


A Solstice Of Abundance: Green Thumb, Blue Dice (Narrative Version)

by Varynova



Series: I Was A Teenage Psychopomp!: Tales of Irreconcilable Fates [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Earth C (Homestuck), F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Jade's Ears Are The Fuzziest And I Want To Pet Them, Lots of Talk About Genitals, No Quirks In Verbal Dialogue, Not Epilogue Compliant, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Sexual Content, Speculation on Troll Biology, Suicide mention, Trans Character, Trans John Egbert, alcohol mention, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-06-23 20:22:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19708732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varynova/pseuds/Varynova
Summary: Jade Harley is fed up with her sister’s crap.  But just when she’s about to admit defeat on understanding why she’s so annoyed, exactly the wrong person crosses her path.  Can a selfish, unctuous troll really teach her the serket to accepting her unfair past?





	1. Botany Ungirdled: Uranium, Meet Fluorine!

**Author's Note:**

> This should be considered a continuation of Flame Kindled Among Ash, chapter 1. It's a parallel story, but as I'm not updating them both serially either one works to read first.
> 
> There is now a [PESTERLOG VERSION](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20013541/) of this story up as a parallel work! It's complete with rambling annotations to each chapter for your rereading enjoyment and perusal.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> News travels fast; June told Rose, who told Kanaya, who told Vriska. Luckily for her, you, Jade Harley, needed some therapy… even though she might be an inadvisable source. But you find that you have much to share in the handling of people, fate, and celestial bodies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to Purplebard, whose [Pilot Light, Pale Rapture](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18524551) series I came across and read about halfway through writing this chapter. (Oddly enough, I’d already named Flame Kindled Among Ash last week before reading it. Just one of those coincidences in a sufficiently large fandom.) I certainly know that their works have already informed my view of Jade (as we clearly agree that she was never given a fair shake or allowed any sense of closure within the narrative itself…) enough that I wanted to shout them out here.

You are, at this moment, hurling your prized vegetables off of a roof. It is not your roof; instead, you chose one of the flatter, more unadorned buildings in the Carapace kingdom, reflective black stone scorching against your bare feet in the late-morning sun. You don't mind. With a meditative slowness, you draw a pumpkin from your pocket, engorge it to a plump and satisfying size, and hurtle it down into the street below. Someone flies up into your periphery right as you chuck a particularly fleshy gourd down to its mealy, splattered end on the concrete, sending a passing gaggle of chessfolk wailing and jogging to a nearby awning for cover. You would think that your behavior would be bizarre enough to ward off interlopers, but when you turn your head you recognize instantly a woman you’ve never spoken to before.

"Well, Jade Harley. Always good to see you makin’ a mess." Vriska Serket perches on the crenellated lip of the building at a perfect forty-five degree angle, watching as you, the young doggirl quixotically dropping produce, send it down to its inevitable demise below. "So… why on Earth-C are you doing this?" The smell of pumpkin meat cooking on the sidewalk filters up.

"Oh, definitely no reason!” Even you don’t believe yourself, and every attempt you make to unflatten your affect feels like jolting a dead frog so its legs twitch. Without looking, you pull the next sacrifice from a fold in your Space hoodie’s monopocket, and size it up from peanut-scale in your hands. “I just needed to- hup!" A gorgeous watermelon, round and perfectly ripe, meets its doom in the street, and a quaint little open-topped car veers around it with a tinny whine from the horn. You know Vriska is still naive to human customs, but you suppose that even she would know this isn't a normal expression of much from human culture, save for what must seem a complete hatred of terrestrial vine-based plants. "-needed to not be in my house anymore! So I came out here."

"S'kind of a fuckin' weird way to get out and about, don't you think?"

"Is it? See, I just figured that I may as well work out a few things, and my usual outlets weren't quite doing it for me."

"Do you even know whose house this is?"

"Who says it isn't mine?"

Vriska puts a foot over the edge of the building, dropping cartoonishly to stand on its side. Gazing through a window, she sees a confused-looking pair of Carapacians inside, trying to enjoy a meal despite the commotion on their roof. "They might." A yellow squash follows Vriska over the parapet. Beige seeds are strewn all across the pavement. "Can I try? It certainly looks like a fun way to vent frustrations."

You smile your broadest smile. Somehow-- you have no idea how-- you keep your ears up, and eyebrows unfurrowed. "No, you can’t!"

You toss a great big melon next, disgorging watery pulp with such excitement that some of it splashes onto Serket’s plaid overshirt. She extends her tongue in sudden disgust, narrow limbs flailing as they futilely try to brush it off but only succeed in getting stringy goo on her gray-tone hands. You feel laughter ripple up from your gut before you can stop it, and she steps back atop the building in the vain hope that she can avoid being drenched in further gore.

You can’t meet her gaze, and your laughter abates soon after. "Did she send you to come look after me? I gave her all the space she needed, you know." You know she’s looking at you, you can feel the burning. You clench your fists, and your broad samoyed tail sweeps a low arc unbidden.

“Hmmm...? I mean, no. Nobody sent me. Who's that you mean, though?”

“Ughh! I gave her SPACE! All the space she wanted, when she pushed me away!!! I took her needs so seriously. Right when we got here, it was all cakedrops and prankster's gambits and letting me replant the hostas and geraniums in her dad's dishevelled flowerbeds. I was so excited to be with family-- to be near people!-- that I spent all the time around her I could manage, even as it was obvious her energy for it was waning week by week. Then she let three months pass without texting me, then I saw her for only our birthdays, then her eighteenth, then, when she had her birthday the other day...” You grit your teeth, unsure if you can possibly care enough to hold back the explanatory torrent about to gush forth from you, but she cuts you off.

“Yeahhh. I heard about this, actually.”

“From whom? Who told you?” You hold back the snarl at the back of your throat, and wrap your lips carefully over sharp canines. _Back to the smile, Jade,_ you think, _or you might make somebody feel threatened._

“Kanaya. She’s worried about you, actually. That and she was afraid that I was the one most likely to misgender June. As if.” _Because you, Vriska Serket, are both an impulsive person and the latest arrival_ , you muse to yourself.

“Did she ask you to check up on me? I don’t know whether to be insulted or flattered at the meddling; Rose still calls her ‘Fussyfangs’, behind her back. Affectionately.”

“Of course I let her goad me into it. I didn’t want to get nagged to come meet you! And I coined that, you know.” She sniffs and rubs under her nose.

 _Yeah_ , you think. _I was told._ In the bits and pieces of the other timeline that have slipped through the cracks in causality, you listened to everyone reminisce and share stories of her for years after her death. Meanwhile in your own timeline, as you lay comatose under her fucking spell it suddenly became all business until they needed you to manage your dogs.

Vriska sits right on the edge of the building, back pockets hanging over the lip. In slow, careful sweeps, her eyes follow you as you pace across the rooftop. Her elbows meet her knees and she lets her hands hang inward, legs spread. Teenage dirtbag.

“I was so fucking worried about June,” you reaffirm. You crack your knuckles, planting both hands back in your pouch and trying to feign nonchalance. “And I cried over her for years because that’s what you do when your only fucking sibling stops cracking jokes, stops taking home the food you make for her, stops even talking to you or any of your friends.” You find yourself exhaling through bared teeth. “So she begged me to stay behind after her party yesterday, and said...”

“’I want to die’. Yyyyeah. And this is your reaction? Little callous, even by my standards, don’t you think?” She strolls over, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of her jeans, eyeing you from all angles.

You slump your shoulders. “It’s not ABOUT that.” A scowl creeps across your lips. “Because it didn’t even surprise me at all.”

“Then what is it about, hm? Not the content of her admission?” She shoots you an incredulous glance.

“Of course not! But when Roxy and Callie told everybody that they were having their own awesome gender revelations, and came to these new self-understandings, I remember thinking-- not being able to stop myself!-- ‘Why hadn’t anyone told me this was a thing you could do??? That would’ve been so cool when I was younger!!’ and I just felt like the most, I dunno, selfish...” You drop your head, and look toward the rooftop, kicking some gravel out from under your foot. “Like, why is that my first thought, ‘I better make this about me’?”

“Probably because you’re a person, ya goof. Sounds like it rattled something loose.”

“Huh?” You turn on one heel, slowly.

“The only reason to think something like that is if it’s meaningful to you.”

Your eyes, you’re certain, are as big as full moons. “But… but, that’s not what I’m trying to...”

But Vriska cocks her head. “What’s there to figure out?”

“You can’t just… do that!”

“Why the fuck not? Sometimes you gotta make sure your needs get met.”

You think of yourself as somebody who can just make things happen, like your sister can. You don’t need to ponder and introspect, you just _do_. You weeded the garden this morning, you fixed a three-bean vegetarian stew in the crockpot, you refilled the birdfeeders and hummingbird sugar-water. How’s that not ‘meeting your needs’? You knew-- or at least, you thought-- that you would be able to take a day to think without some overdramatic confrontation on the part of any of your more nosy friends.

In fact, you’re not even sure why you’re telling her this at all. But if this candy-corn-horned semi-stranger is going to interrogate you on your identity and troubles, maybe the least she can do in return is to give you the straight dick. Okay, maybe you’d put it differently, because that’s one of your grandfather’s aphorisms. But still, she might help.

Perhaps you can admit that you were fascinated to meet the bizarre whirlwind of discord who had affected your friends, human and troll alike, so strongly. Hell, they told you that Vriska tends to hit everyone in her orbit upside the head with the wind-strewn detritus of revelation. Maybe you even held some latent curiosity as to how exactly she does it. And apparently both the means and the message were the same, in this case: do whatever you want, and drag the world along with you.

You realize that you have been staring, hands in your pockets, for a while now. But the troll girl just watches you with a smug smile on her lips, seemingly content to needle with questions. So, you decide, you can fire one back. “I can’t imagine demanding that out of other people, to ignore their needs and demand they meet mine instead! How is that not, you know, ABSURDLY SELFISH???”

“Easy! It sounds like you’ve been unhappy lately. Do you think that your shitty mood doesn’t rub off on those around you? And that maybe focusing on improving yourself might ultimately help people around you fix their shit more than fussing over them could? Your gift to them can be letting them watch you just be functional.”

“That logic is fucking twisted. Besides...” You cross your arms, ears drooping. Still, you feel compelled to meet her gaze.

She watches you intently. “Hm?”

“What do you do if your selfish desire… IS to spend time with them? What if they don’t want that, and you’re pressuring them for way too much?”

“Have they said that? Did anybody actually tell you that they didn’t want to hang out with you, or are you making that up? Are people mostly just too busy with their own shit and run down from their lives to make it happen on their own?”

“I dunno.”

“Then, again: what the fuck benefit do you get talking yourself out of that sale? Let people surprise you with their magnanimity and you might eventually learn that they DO enjoy spending time with you.”

You avert your eyes. She says it in a way that makes it sound elegant and simple, and almost… condescending? No, that’s not the right word. Something closer to obvious, but that just hadn’t occurred to you in that exact way before. You wonder if she just lives her whole life by that principle of selfless selfishness. The possibility sends a chill down your spine.

You let your memory drift back to the last time you let yourself-- of your own volition-- feel the full brunt of your feelings, without reining yourself back for their benefit. Back on earth, your earth, you awoke from a brain-assaulting dream of hellsquiddles with enough fury to scream down two Karkats at once, and as you felt your mind splitting from the sound of your own voice you strewed every constraining reminder from your fingers into the pond. Memory was never your curse.

But you remember that hazy nightmare, when your every sense was muddled by the pounding in your ears and the animal blood between your teeth, and with a flick of your wrist you bid the corrupted Maid to impale him, to make him viscerally aware of the fact that you could. You feel the twinge, like a syringe to the base of the skull, that maybe, in the slightest way, you’re still disappointed that you didn’t get to watch.

She deserved to have that tower toppled onto her, refining her body to a thin elemental paste capped with sparkling slippers. Nobody has asked you why you haven’t worn them since, because, to the best of your knowledge, only your sister and Roxy recall exactly what you did.

You wonder how June ever forgave you. If.

And then, you see your fingers tangled in her green-hued chestfur, underneath supernovae of tears. She is dogyou but not you-you, she is bawling like a blubbering infant and you shake and you yell and you belt a primal roar into her canine snout. Your hand comes up to bear in a flash and you feel your claws-- no, nails-- meet spriteflesh over and over. You will crush the mewling weakness out of her body. But the message from him-- the only man you ever dearly, dearly tried to hate-- rings and buzzes from the dozen minicomputers on your person, graying out the sun-green madness from the center of your vision. You flew away, bawling and disoriented.

The sudden gutpunch of memory twists your innards like a knot, dogguts tangled with heady self-rage and a burst of pure adrenaline. You bend at the middle, almost retching, and swoon sideways, and Vriska rises to her feet. But instead of reaching for her, or to steady yourself against a crenellation, you paw at your own face, teary and incredulous at the lack of slashmarks.

You think about every time you ever wanted to berate somebody for what still feels inexorably like selfishness, and every time you just smiled at them because you knew it wouldn’t do any good.

Your knees, through layers of tights and thick peasantskirt, hit the roof first in a ripple of smart pain, and you stiffen upright, blinking for a moment. The scattered visions of faraway planets and uncountable nebulae have been waning, as of late, but for a moment all you see is stars. You bat away Vriska’s concerned hand, which was not quite reaching out to help pull you up so much as preparing to touch your arm disassuredly.

“Strong feelings about that one?” The flight-muscle in your back flexes, picking you up by the collar like a scruffed puppy. You force out a sigh, suddenly aware of every mote of dirt under your fingernails. The back of your hand clears away an errant tear.

You flex your knees, let your eyes go unfocused, and spread your feet to shoulder-width. “I turned myself into a sprite, once.” Air inflates your lungs once more, tinged with the humid sweet scent of early summer, and your solar plexus unknots itself. “But I didn’t like her.”

You are Jade Harley. You are star-stuff. You are the forge and the metalwork, you are the die and the casting that results.

Your hair billows in a wild arc behind you, and you will your mind to align like a syzygy of celestial forces. You shut your eyes and watch them move, planets in a perfect line, bodies in eclipse.

Spidertroll pats you firmly on the shoulder from behind. “C’mon, let’s get you some fuckin’ ice cream.”


	2. Find A Cool Bug, Eat A Cool Bug

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the light starts to peek through the cracks in the universe, the sane response is to close those cracks in any way you can, or at least not look. But isn’t sanity just the faulty notion that everyone’s brains should work the same way? And if you’re a Hero of Light, isn’t it your duty to regard that knowledge as it streams in past every defense?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ‘Graphic Depiction of Violence’ warning applies to the aside at the end of this chapter.

A Vriska Serket died, but before she died she dreamt, and dated an irrelevant, dead shard of June Egbert while she did. The irony is that you, the REAL Vriska Serket, only recalled this torrid tryst when you awoke with a gasp, here on Earth C, covered in a discarded heap of wellwishing cards piled atop somebody’s linens. Bits and pieces flowed in from her life, but nothing conclusive. More bad luck.

They failed to throw you a parade, the gaggle of people who snaked through your room to come see you, or at least try to understand your sudden arrival. Well, you’re told it’s your room, but in reality it’s just a facsimile of your home on Alternia painstakingly reconstructed here.

Kanaya stopped by, Rose close behind her, and Dave and Karkat, and… you suppose those four other kids showed up, Roxy and the other Strider and… Jonk? You’re pretty sure his name was Jonk. And Jane. That was three months ago, but Terezi is still flying back from fuck-knows-where, and you have no idea how you made it to this universe at all. You’ve mostly heard empty platitudes of welcome, and several people have cried on you, but nobody has as of yet offered up a coherent explanation. All that can be known is that when you unleashed the Juju a sweep and a half ago, you blacked out suddenly, and when you came to, her memories were seeping in like fungal rot and you felt your personality changing.

* * *

You once watched Jade Harley pocket an entire sun. It was… awe-inspiring? existentially terrifying? breathtaking? even from a universe away and the safety of your cradle-meteor. She plucked it from the sky, and examined it distractedly, like a child with a gumball. You were worried she might pop it into her mouth.

You, Thief of Light, have never stolen brilliance on that scale.

You’re pretty sure that you should feel guilty for this, but you’re glad that she’s already distressed enough to skip past the pleasantries and speak to you like an old moirail. That means you’re on even footing when it comes to a disdain for simpering politeness. You have adjourned to a nearby park, appropriately wooded, with winding paths and plenty of ducks to stuff with bread. Jade returns from the ice cream vendor with two small dishes-- which you graciously paid for-- green tea for her, and yours, which she describes as ‘many-legged and wriggling.’

“It was the way she said it, it really just… set me off! She begged me to help her die, knowing that she was me! She must have known how I would take it, so it was… kinda fucked!” Jade is wrapping up an extended retelling of her self-directed rage, the catalyst for beating her sprite-self and berating her. You watched the whole thing when it happened, but you can’t claim to recall more of your feelings than appreciation at her ability to go shithive maggots on the parts of herself she hates.  
You’ve been there.

“If you’re waiting for me to say you should have handled it better, bad news. She was a mess, and worse, she wasn’t gonna help you do the shit that needed to get done, like hold off Jack or help June prep for the scratch.”

Setting off towards the heart of the park, the two of you cross a footbridge over a lilypad-strewn brook. The cobblestone path is flanked by a gorgeous arboretum, thousands of hand-planted trees of every size and origin stretching as far as the eye can see. But Jade Harley isn’t gazing at the scenery and is instead touching everything, sampling, cooing over each plant and weird bug. Suddenly, she just can’t help but seat herself at the edge of the embankment, rolling up the end of her oil-green footless tights. She splashes into the pond underneath the bridge, using her free hand to dig through the murky water after some amphibious friend she thought she saw. “She was a part of me! Like, right now, I’m still her! And I know she felt like that...”

“But it’s manipulative, no matter whether or not she ‘really meant it’.” You rest a hand on your hip, watching her wade and sift through weeds.

She shakes her head. “That wasn’t what she was trying to accomplish, and I don’t think it’s the case for June either.”

“Na’ah, classic manipulator behavior. It’s really easy to throw at helpful people like you because they know you’ll do absolutely anything for ‘em if they do.”

Jade’s arm extends backward, forefinger extended from her precariously-held ice cream. “I’m sorry, is-- is this ‘vrissplaining?’ Because that’s the foremost thing they said to expect, that you’d try to narrate my entire life to me in order to solve some problem or have it make sense to you.”

You stare at the back of her head. You, Alternian diva, are not often rendered speechless.

Finishing her business in the ditch, your human companion wipes her hand dry on her skirt with a satisfied hum. “Nope,” she says, wading back out. “June doesn’t have a manipulative bone in her body. She’s not Tavros, nor would she put forward that veneer of weakness just to communicate that she needs support.” She starts out down the path, digging into her dessert again. You jog, following her. “Mostly the thing that surprised me was June admitting she needed help, because she tends to smile, and… go with the flow, I guess?”

“Like smiling wouldn’t be equally manipulative? Doesn’t mean she’s happy, just that she wants to hide that her life sucks. But the other thing it sounds like you’re not used to is people telling you they need you.” You hustle up behind her. You catch up just as she plops onto a nearby metal bench shaded by two bowed earth trees.

Jade looks confused, and ponders your words. “Could be, yeah. Closest I’ve had in the past is trying to dig through Dave’s layers of insincerity.”

You shrug, seating yourself with legs crossed. “They’ve started doing that to me as well. I don’t know how to take people trusting me, if I’m honest. Not sure if I like it, just yet.” You stretch your jaw wide, and pick something squirmy out of your knifelike molars. Without even examining it, you pop it back into your mouth and crunch down with zeal. You catch Jade staring, and she gazes off into the boughs of a tree across the clearing. “I’m, uh, also dealing with another me taking up my time and demanding I take her seriously, actually.”

You let it sit for a moment, but Jade’s polite attention doesn’t waver. She waits patiently for you to elaborate. You pick at your Crawlers ‘n’ Cream, biting down on a spoonful heavy with white chocolate and grainy bug chunks.

“In that other timeline-- where Terezi gave me what-for before June could, my ghost self became somebody I reeeeeeeeally hated.”

The space witch gives you the side eye. “Oh? How so? Too capable of cutting slack for the weaklings of the universe?” You can almost hear the scoff, but she politely refrains.

“Something like that, yeah,” you say. “This other me spent years in the bubbles, and when I finally tracked her down it wasn’t enough for me to just take away the Juju she had thoughtfully stashed for me-- I needed to trash her style, her silly haircut, the way she cried after just a few insults.” You suck down the dregs of your soupy, too-warm custard, and Jade takes your empty bowl, fitting it underneath her own. You fidget, uncrossing and recrossing your legs. “But just knowing that the game’s done now, and that some of us still might not escape having other versions of ourselves try to muscle in on our brains...”

“You’ve started seeing things her way, that other Vriska’s.”

“Just about!” Compelled to stand, you find yourself shouting, almost too loud. You fold your arms in against your stomach. Her dog ears flick, but Harley otherwise doesn’t react. “Whether by this godawful planet’s lack of conflict or sburb laughing at me via the medium, I’m beginning to collect her memories, and I know it’s making me... different.” You turn in place.

“Is this a Light-aspect thing? Could you ask Rose?” The girl in the black hoodie taps her chin.

“I don’t fuckin’ know. How the fuck would I know?”

She opens her mouth, closes it again. Taking the last spoonful of ice cream, somehow still solid, Jade sets it on her tongue and lets it run back into her throat.

“So now I have to share brainspace with thoughts I KNOW are coming from that goober’s point of view. Or worse.”

“Or worse?” Jade cocks her head, maybe in subconscious emulation of her canine side. You idly wonder, for an instant, if she did it before she became like this, but you snap out of it.

“Or worse. Karkat used to imagine you making out with your doppleganger, you know.”

You figure this will throw her for a loop, shock her, make her snarl at you or narrow her eyes. But she laughs instead, and stands up to throw away the garbage. “I do know about that, actually! He told me himself.”

“He told you that? And you didn’t hit him?”

“I mean, I may’ve hit him, but not for that, and not when he didn’t request it. We dated for a while, actually.”

Alright, your turn to express the disbelief bubbling up from your stomach. Though maybe it’s the bugs. “You and Karkat… dated? Like, romantically?” You trot after her to the trash can, trying to gauge if she’s bullshitting you.

“It was spades, actually. No, I guess that’s technically romantic? He asked me to be his kismesis, and I said, yeah, okay, I’ll give it a shot, because I knew how often I got so mad at him I couldn’t see straight, but also how much I wanted to kiss him on his little cheeks just to watch him grouse...”

“Why didn’t it work out? I mean, I can’t really see you, of all your humanpals, trying to do spades, much less with a wet noodle like Vantas.”

“You’re right. I’m definitely not capable of cuddling up to the people I wanted to clobber an hour before, and once we were out of our shitty, garbage session I couldn’t hold up the level of hatred he wanted. The irony? He didn’t have any lasting hard feelings after we broke up. I’m glad he’s happy with Dave. I still hang out at their place, most weekends.”

“God, Karkat wanted to fuck me so bad.” Now it’s your turn to stride past, setting the pace for your walk. But Jade merely matches your stride and walks next to you, bemused grin settling into her rounded features.

“Why do you say stuff like that? I mean, I guess you’re trying to get a rise out of me, but that’s not how you’ve been talking for hours, and my guess is that it’s got something to do with that other Vriska you mentioned.”

“Hell of a claim, Harley.” You teethe at your lip, and draw your overshirt over the center of your chest, as though it will draw out the growing gnawing ache. “She was the last person I helped out, ya know. It was for her own good, but I guess that’s the sort of thing I said to a lot of people I fucked up over the sweeps.”

She didn’t even know that she needed it, because she’d fooled herself into believing…  
Well, you’re not sure. But she was sure convinced that Meenah truly wanted to spend time with her, truly wanted her attention and enjoyed her company. God, enough to just monologue at her for days on end. Well, some things never change: Vriska Serket will never stop talking.

Meenah. Fuuuuuuuuck. She was the one who told you that introspection was meant to make you feel like shit, that thinking hard about yourself would wrap around from self-loathing and make you a better person. Then you-- no! The other Vriska!-- got soft, got slow, stopped caring.

You didn’t see her in that last big brawl, but you’re sure Meenah’s dead. Well, double-dead. She talked about death so glibly that it hadn’t occurred to you before, but there’s really no way she made it out, is there?

You stole Vriska from her without letting them really say goodbye. You refocus your eyes eightfold, trying to clear from your mind the sight of both of them, one crumpled in a heap on the ground, the other walking away out of the inky black void of the dream bubble. You remember how both their eyes welled with tears.

You can force back your old self’s memories of time spent with Meenah: a faire, an ill-advised tattoo, those sweet boots… but you still can’t drown the feelings of hopelessness and despair she felt as she realized that everything she’d ever strove to accomplish was just to fill the longing void left by…

“Vriska?” The sound of the birds and the nearby creek rush back into your aural canals, and you loosen your mouth and shake your head stiffly, like a dog trying to reset its nervous system after a bad taste or smell. Jade’s regarding you closely, and blinks at you. You blink back at her, willing yourself not to cry.

“Vriska, you stopped… well, doing anything. Walking, talking.”

“I used to want people to hate me,” you say, voice almost cracking. “It made it easier to feel like I could do the shit that needed to get done. It makes me so mad that I can’t just put it out of my head, anymore. You hate me, right? You wouldn’t be spending time with me right now if June hadn’t set you off.” You find yourself turning away, eyes focused on nothing.

But Jade rests a hand on your upper arm. “No, I… I don’t hate you. I think I did, ages ago, but not anymore. I don’t have a use for grudges.” Your other hand seeks it out, just… resting on hers.

“I was the one who forced you to sleep away your teenage years, and it meant you could never interact with your friends.” You turn your head, watching her.

“That’s true. They couldn’t depend on me either, because who needs a sleeping princess to save them?” Earth’s first guardian draws herself up to her full height, shoulders rolled back and posture relaxed, facing you. Even disregarding the tangle of black hair and her pointed white dog-ears, she’s taller than you by at least an inch, maybe two. “But you did what you had to do, or at least what you thought would make you matter. I can’t hate somebody who doesn’t think they have a choice in their actions, and we all know the hell that the ‘alpha timeline’ wrought on our minds.”

“We’re… different people than we were back then, aren’t we.”

“Thankfully,” Jade says with a nod, green eyes gleaming. “Yes, yes we are.” She turns forward again, releasing your arm, and you pull your hand back. She walks down the path, but lingers until she hears you follow in step.

“What if that’s not a good thing, though?"

She glances at you quizzically, but you continue.

"I guess… it would have to be if we don’t want to crush ourselves into a shape that’s just built to meet somebody else’s needs, huh.”

“Yeah,” your human friend assents, turning an ear politely towards you. “It took me a while to make that change, but I’m glad I did it.” She stops abruptly, facing a tree. “This is a cherry tree, or might be a hybrid,” she says, pointing up into its high boughs filled with tiny white blossoms, but no fruit. “I always wanted to climb one of these, as a kid, but obviously we didn’t have any on the island.”

With an effortful grunt, she puts a bare calloused foot against the bark of it, and digs in with her short, rounded fingers. Jade Harley begins her scramble up the trunk, foot by foot, a determined hound bent on discovery.

Not one to be outdone, you take off your bright red shoes, tossing them aside and stripping off your long-sleeved flannel shirt leaving only your plain black tee and jeans. Climbing, for trolls, is remarkably easy on the soft, giving flesh of earth-trees, with no acidic prongs or flaying vines trying to whip you from their husks. But Jade, for all that she’s not built as sturdy as a troll, has a startling alacrity, and is halfway up the trunk by the time your claws find their first purchase in the wood. The satisfying clack of it yielding to your digits, the way that each handhold resists against your whole weight as you heft yourself higher off the ground, and the sight of a dog-eared young woman disappearing past the first layer of high branches pushes other-Vriska from your thoughts.

A few minutes later, you’re both sitting in the upper boughs of the tree, some fifteen feet off the ground. Your arm is wrapped around the trunk as you steady yourself, and as you look down you notice how much further it seems from this end than the other.

Your companion isn’t really steadying herself on much, and is humming a low, stately dirge just across the tree from you, swaying in the rhythm of some breeze you can’t feel. You’ve never noticed before just how happy she looks when she’s succeeding, when she has dirt between her toes and sunlight on her face.

“Alright, earth girl. How do we get back down?” You’re pretty sure you’d survive this fall, especially if you protected your head and neck from hitting the stones or some of the spread roots underneath it. So focused are you on your path of egress that you don’t notice her drift in next to you, black hoodie slowly encompassing your vision.

“Vriska? We can fly, you know.” Her skirt wafts and billows in the breeze, gentle ripples waving along with the buds on the tree branches.

“Oh, yeah.” You swallow the frog in your throat. “Shortcuts!”

“C’mon, I’ll help you down.”

“...Thanks.”

This is like those godawful Eastern Alternian cartoons, the ones Terezi promised to introduce you to if you ever saw each other again. One heroine plucks the other out of some precarious place by the knees and shoulders, and she nestles her head against the other one’s breast as they drift back down to the caressing ground.

Well, close enough to the cartoons. You can smell her shampoo from here, something citrusy, vanilla-y, and rich. Her chin sits just in front of your horns, probably milimeters from the top of your head. “I can fly too, you fuck. You don’t have to treat me like a goddamned wiggler.” You kick your legs with a wrinkled nose, and Jade laughs, plopping you back down feetfirst in front of your shirt and shoes. You brush off your jeans, and she’s reclining in the air in front of you, drifting by like a wandering moon about to pass out of your orbit.

“Hey,” she starts. “I had a lot of fun today, so thanks for hangin’ out with me. I think I did need somebody to talk to, after all.”

You hear your heart beating in your ears, but you remain composed. “Yeah. Yeah, sure thing, Harley. You go give your sister what-for.”

“Bye.” She floats off towards the treetops, leaving you to tie your shoes.

* * *

She charges you, upraised arm knocking the wind from your chest as she plants you against the wall. “Pyrope!” You exclaim, gaze falling into the undeniable, utter redness of those cute little teardrop-shaped glasses.

But Terezi utters a gutteral wail, and her head doesn’t stop rushing forward when her eyes are even with your own. Her jaw hinges open, and her teeth plant right into the orange fabric of your shirt right where your shoulder meets gray neckflesh. They immediately pierce skin, soaking you with a gout of your own blood, the smell punching your nostrils like rust and seafoam. The sound of it is somewhere between the crunch of bone and the squelch of a pump biscuit being torn free from a chest. You see the world tumble before you feel your knees give out, and the piercing, primordial scream from your own throat shocks you just as much as the sudden agony.

When your eyes flutter open again, she’s wiping her mouth, arm now coated in cerulean paint; it’s the same tint that runs in a broad smear down the wall. She leans against her cane. “That,” she sputters, “is what you get for three years’ rent on my heart.”

You cough. “Well, I’m here. And now I’m bleeding all over the floor, so… good job, Terezi. You’ve got my attention.”


	3. A Foolish Constancy of Fluids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jade’s pretty used to her friends flopping down in front of her, missing most of their blood. Today will be a day of strictly no surprises for her, then.

A crack of thunder issues forth, illuminating a figure standing on your porch. You jump-- well, levitate-- enough to jostle the blanket over your lap, and as you cast your reading tablet aside you stand from the loveseat. Flinging the door open, you see her: it’s Vriska, right side completely coated with blood, which is pouring from a layer of bandages on her shoulder totally inadequate to the task of keeping her blue fluids inside her body.

“Long time no see, furball,” she says with a wan smile, soaked lips almost gray from exsanguination. You spoke to this woman, for the first time, three days ago, and now she has paid you a visit at home.

“Vriska!!!!” you shout, stomach leaping to your throat. “What the FUCK happened?”

“Girls.” She slumps forward into your arms.

* * *

When you come to again, Jade’s moved you into her bed, and propped you up against the multitude of pillows of every color and shape, plumpness and length. You open your eyes, shifting your unmaimed arm to rest against the crook of the wall, and sigh a contented sigh. She’s sitting just a few feet away, watching you now, green eyes running up your whole torso.

“Like what you see, Harley?” In the course of replacing your dressings, your kind caretaker removed your soaked, shredded, and bloodspattered shirt, leaving your breasts completely ungirdled. _Of all the days to not wear a bra_ , you muse, with a soft chuckle.

“You scared the shit out of me, Vriska.”

“Aah, you know trolls are sturdier than that. I didn’t risk dyin’. Though I’ll admit that after some of the shit I’ve pulled on her I don’t have the guarantee that it wouldn’t be a Just death.”

You smile. Jade doesn’t laugh. Instead, the adorable ridge between her thick black eyebrows rumples, and she crosses her arms. “It’s not ONLY that, though! What were you thinking, just appearing on my doorstep after we’ve spoken ONE time with this tacit assumption that I’ll just--”

You hold up one finger, trembling and bent, which is enough to cause Jade to close her mouth with a huff. “I get what you’re saying. Truth be told, I’m not sure why I DID come here, though I appreciate the payback for me listening to your every problem and offering constructive solutions, vis a vis, fixing your life.”

Harley blushes. _Is it possible,_ you think, _that she’s not aware that that’s what happened? What, did she think it was some kind of date?_

 _Shit, do I?_ You’re not exactly gobsmacked by the notion, though. Truth be told, it was one of the better first dates you’ve ever gone on-- and you bet it was due to the lack of an awkward ‘are we, aren’t we’ conversation about whether it’s even a date at all. Vriska Serket can tolerate mind games, but that wishy-washy bullcrap doesn’t fly. Fine, you’ve decided. _It was a date._

“I live ten minutes outside of town, by flight. That’s a long time for this level of profuse bleeding, and you had to already know where I lived. You’ve never lived on a planet with a hospital before, right? Is that why?”

You’re not sure she’ll like the answer to that question, yet, so you hedge your bets. “Why do you think I came to talk to you a few days ago? Why did I show up on that roof, and why did we hang out?”

You gaze around the room. It’s a well-lit bedroom, dark hardwood floors stretching to the other three corners, with the bed right by the door to the wide staircase. In the daylight, you presume, light streams in from floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, arranged so that the sun doesn’t ever blind her while she’s trying to work. You expected the other two to be coated in posters for fandoms and obsessions, but instead she’s mounted mostly framed artwork, still-lifes and a few drawings of her, likely done by her human companions. It looks almost like a cathedral in the woods.

The space witch gives you a look. “Well, you said it was because Kanaya asked you to.”

You nod. “Yeah, that was a lie. If you couldn’t tell, people aren’t exactly good at getting me to do what they want me to. I just couldn’t help but wonder how the heck you’d been dealing with absorbing your alternate selves, and feeling like you’d been knocked out of the running for ‘most important person in the universe’, and I wanted to know how you could still be so chipper about it.”

“And what exactly did you find?”

“That, just as I suspected, you weren’t pleased with it at all, either part.”

For having so many distinct areas of focus, the whole room is remarkably tidy: her music equipment sits next to a desk set up for her laptop and drawing supplies to charge, compact printing and Alchemization equipment next to that, and she has some media stuff set up near a couch by the windows so she can look out on her garden or up the path that approaches from the main road into town. On the other side of the room, there’s a drafting desk, though its corner is the only one justifiably termed ‘disheveled’; mostly it’s just full of a few scattered papers and dogeared books, and sizable tomes about plant biology or natural history or orbital mechanics. You presume that it’s also where Jade gets most of her mathematics work done, if she even has cause to fuck around with that sort of thing anymore. Next to that is an easel, close enough to the windows for paintings of nature or animals.

“So, what? You showed up out of nowhere to goad me into oversharing about my shitty situation, get me emotionally compromised, and…” she fiddles with her hands in space, as if trying to knit frustration into understanding with invisible needles. “What, learn about yourself?”

Your gaze drops to your lap as your expression sours. “There was no goading. Or, at least, I wasn’t trying to goad. I was surprised you talked to me at all, honestly.”

But Jade’s glance turns coy. “You’re selling yourself short, Vriska. You admitted more than you might have wanted, and I hope you got to use that to figure out what you needed to.”

You couldn’t see it that well in the storm, your vision having been blurred by blood and rain, but if you had to guess you’d say you were on the third floor, most of which is dominated by Harley’s living space. The high ceilings, sloped and rafted, must be the roof, with a skylight so the moon would be visible from the bed, though for now it’s coated in the gentle rain still coming down from dark clouds. Warm light suffuses the whole room from a few standing lamps and overhead fixtures. And her bed, which-- now that you’ve examined it, does contain pillows, but is mostly populated with stuffed animals and some other shapes of cushion, including one massive toy polar bear-- you’d guess is what humans call ‘queen sized’, with linens in a deep forest green.  
_Deeper than her eyes. No, Vriska-- Focus._

You try to move your shoulder, but it’s stiff and shoots with pain the instant you start to sit up. Jade sees you wince, and scoots closer along the edge of the bed, reaching to check the wound again.

“This might surprise you, but I kinda miss when I had a mechanical arm. At least then I’d have a fifty-fifty shot that my exes would bite the wrong one, and I’ve always had a bit of luck on my side.” You cough, lungs emitting a wet, hacking growl. Your head pounds, and you lean it back against the luxurious velvet pillow propped behind you.

“I hope you get… some kind of troll pneumonia,” Jade says darkly.

“Why? So you can keep me in your bed to care for until I recuperate?”

She turns away, blushing, and crosses her jeaned legs.

“Mm,” you continue, rubbing the bridge of your nose with your good hand. “I’m not hearing a no. Glad the rumors about a certain young witch were true.”

Trying to hold back a smile, she points a finger at your wound. “Are you going to tell me what happened? Who did this to you? I've seen sharkbites with less depth and smaller puncture diameter.”

“You've seen sharkbites?”

She huffs. “Look, when you live alone on a Pacific island and enjoy ocean swimming, shark bite care is a perfectly reasonable precaution to take. ...Was it Kanaya?”

You shake your head. “God, I wish. No, this was Terezi, and again, it was pretty justified.”

“She’s back? And you saw her? And she just… left you there, bleeding out???”

“It’s traditional.” You bob your head apologetically.

Jade mouths something to herself, under her breath. It looks like, ‘fucking trolls’.

“Well, I’m going to get you some food. Like soup?” Her hands pass to her knees, foisting herself up. She collects a basin of water, a damp towel, and a pile of blue-stained washcloths from the floor by the bed.

“Soup is bullshit.”

She strides towards the door. “Too bad. It’s spicy summer squash with basil, cilantro, and coconut milk.” She disappears over the cusp.

“That sounds fuckin’ amazing,” you whisper as you close your eyes, just for a moment.

* * *

The lush, mingled scent of cinnamon and cilantro still swims through the room, though Vriska’s bowl is empty. You’ve never seen a troll eat anything but raw meat so quickly, and you catch yourself idly hoping that it’s an unguarded commentary on your cooking skills moreso than partial starvation. Your smart-bracelet beeps, and you tug your phone from your pocket to check the time. _Oh, geez._ You sigh, setting your phone on its wireless charging plate, clack your glasses down on the bedside table, and begin to tug off your sweater and undershirt, but you see Vriska craning her neck back in the corner of your eye.

“Whoa, whoa! Whoa, Harley. I didn’t think you had it in you, this sinister ploy to overpower and assault a maimed woman who you’ve manuevered into your bed through circumstance and medical attention.”

You give her a look that you hope is adequately scathing, and almost laugh, hands on your bent hips. “It’s two-thirty A.M. My alarm is going off in three and a half hours, and I need to get at least SOME sleep. And if you think you get the bed and I’m going to adjourn to my own couch you’ve another thing to learn about me.” You gesture instructively to the open half of the queen-sized accomodations as you unclasp the front hooks on your bra.

“Six!? What human reason could ever have existed to get up at that obscene hour?” Vriska scoots over, but is sure to convey her petulance through the movement of her arm and hips.

“Heirloom tomatoes,” you explain, voice dragging with exhaustion, “delay for neither woman nor god. I may be both, but I still have to be up to check them for parasites and late blight. Then tomorrow was the day I had scheduled to get the asparagus, carrots, and sunflowers in the front garden, and I have to transplant the herbs from the greenhouse to the back garden, and that all has to be done by noon. Unless you’re offering to help and save me the extra half hour. Hand me your glasses, would you?” She does, and you set them aside. From the edge of the bed, you unzip your jeans and strip down, casting them into the hamper with a single movement. You turn to slide your feet and tail under the single sheet, head falling onto your pillow, and as you do you notice that Vriska has pulled her legs up and is leaned against the wall, staring into space. You take a deep breath, closing your eyes. “What is it?”

You hear her rustle against the bed, reorganizing a few cushions and soft friends. “How do you sleep in this bed? It’s so… plush, and round everywhere. And not nearly wet enough.”

“Lying down might help. If it’s too uncomfortable on your clavicle, then use Rex as a sit-up pillow, see if you can get comfy enough to at least shut your eyes.”

“Rex?”

“Ursidae Rex. The teddy bear.” She realigns the person-sized polar bear behind her. Leaning against his huge, flat head, its stuffing compacted from years of similar treatment, her body settles, and you can feel her weight sinking into the pillowtop mattress. You reach above your head and click the light off. But you feel her fidgeting again, so you look over towards the wall: neck craned back, she’s gazing through the skylight, and you see her yellow eyes glimmer with the stars. It’s not just that, though. You’d swear, even in the little light afforded by the copse of trees around your home, that she’s blushing, cheeks flush with blue. “I’m sorry, I hope I haven’t embarassed you. ...And if it’s too weird for me to sleep next to you, I can go downstairs. It’s fine, I promise.”

You begin to shift the covers, but she responds, voice diminuitive and strained. “Please don’t. I can’t be alone right now.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

She brushes your question aside, answering it with her own. “Why do you like sleeping naked?”

“The last time I slept with my clothes on, you were there.” You don’t mean that to sound as harsh as it does, but it’s out of your mouth before you can react to the thought.

“...Sorry.”

“S’ok. You might also be more comfortable if you take your jeans off, though. I promise I can’t see anything.”

“Yeah.” You hear the zipper work, and she tosses them vaguely in the direction of your drafting table’s office chair. “You’re not wrong, huh. This bed’s really soft.”  
“...”  
“...”  
“Jade…? Your breasts are really nice.”

You notice that your breath is suddenly very warm, uncontrollable heat seeping into your nose and across the covers. “Thanks, I grew ‘em myself. But you’re not the first to see ‘em. You should try to get some sleep.” _What a funny thought for her to verbalize. Unless she’s trying to compliment me in the only way she can think of…_ And it clicks in your head why Vriska can’t sleep.

“You should hold me. I’ll sleep better.” She’s returned to that ironclad Vriska tone, just short of demanding.

“...Yeah. If it’ll help, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

You shimmy over in the bed, rolling a leg past hers and onto one of the pillows against the wall. Your arm slides around Vriska’s lower back, between her and the curve of the bear, and you drape the other across her legs, trying to lay comfortably beside her with your head on the cushiony bear’s foot. But no matter how much you nudge it with your shoulder, it just won’t make way for your neck like it should.

You never expected a single action in Vriska Serket’s life to be appropriately described as ‘furtive’, but that’s exactly what you’d call her touch: long nails crawl across your back, inch by inch, treating your skin like eggshells. Her palm comes to rest against your bare shoulderblade. You breathe deep, letting her feel the rise and fall of your lungs with each breath.

Her legs are still a little clammy, and she wraps the sheet over your back as you settle against the bed, skin against her skin. “Lemme know if you're uncomfortable anytime. I value your bodily autonomy,” you mumble groggily. In response to this, she rests a hand onto the back of your head, rubbing your scalp, and you roll forward, head against her stomach. You can’t help a smile. “Jus' don't rub behind my ears or I'll thump my leg. I can't help it.” You feel the quick exhalations of her silent laughter.

“I asked you for this because I want it, you know.”

“I know,” you respond. “I like it too.”

“...Okay.”

Her breathing slows in time with your own, and you feel your heart rate settle; in through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Soon, she’s dozed off, even as you now find your own restlessness not overpowered by fatigue.

* * *

Once, during a freak snowstorm, a ‘Kona low’ on your idyllic island in the Pacific, you broke a tooth sledding down your private volcano. You marveled at it, because you were a boisterous, indestructable 11-year-old, but when the pain broke through the shock you bawled and sobbed until Bec appeared to fold you back into the space of your bedroom. You capped it yourself, with a perfect dental mold and precision tools, but you always wondered in some dark corner of your mind what would happen if you had contracted appendicitis, or shingles, or cracked your collarbone. Would Bec have had the wherewithal to transport you to a hospital, check on your care, and return you for convalescence? Would the Dreambot have been capable of major surgery on the anaesthetized person steering it?

You shiver, and Vriska wraps an arm around you without stirring from her slumber. Six AM comes surprisingly early, and you slip out of bed, having spent the whole night awake and pondering.

You’re done being alone, you decide. You’re much better off when this house is full of light, the more the better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to gog that Jade gets to be not-exhausted and not-enraged soon, I promise!


	4. The Two-Body Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our early-rising avant gardner finds herself havin' trouble breathin' in. She'll never get that sweatshirt back, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with apologies to Courtney Barnett, I guess.

It's eleven A.M. You’ve been working and weeding and watering and seeding for five hours, having started after your morning coffee and having paused only for a breakfast of two eggs over easy, some grilled tomato, and a pint of orange juice. Vriska steps out of your house, arm already looking considerably less shredded, wearing the same clothing as yesterday plus your Space hoodie and a massive, floppy sun hat, which doesn't surprise you, because you spied her through the solarium windows nabbing it on her way to the front of the house.

She flexes her legs in that effortful, superheroic way, blasting off from the ground. You think, in the fraction of a second after you take off in flight after her, that you're still disappointed that it doesn't eject a great downdraft of dust every time, as nonmagical thrust would. But it's too much to demand sense from the process, you just need to accept it.

You catch up to her in an instant, because you, when you want to be, can be very large, and traverse space proportionally quicker than a garden-variety deity. You consider snatching the hat off of her head, but imagine that it might set the wrong tone for the conversation. Instead, as you shrink back down to a less intimidating size, you fly under her, hand outstretched in a wave. "Good morning, Vriska! Glad you're not dead."

The troll girl whooshes over you, slowing to a stop. You see, with dismay, the horn-holes now punched in the straw round of your hat, somewhat offset from the two already existing for your ears. You decide it's not worth worrying why she didn't use them; she did seem to be in a hurry to avoid you. "Jade! Heeeeeeeey! Thanks so much, again, for last night."

You consider pointing out how much that would sound like something else to a passerby. But you'd rather not stray from the point, not when there's work to be done.

"Y'know, I almost don't think you mean that, given how fast you're running away. Not to guilt you into anything, but it's an interesting way to treat a host." You flutter your eyelashes at her, and the deep yellow of her eyes widens against the sky.

"Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, but I've got some really important--"

"You were pretty chewed up last night, Vriska. I really hope you're not doing what I think you might be, especially if you haven't given that arm enough time to recuperate." You bring yourself upright, rising up to meet her glance, barely a foot apart. "Probably can't do much in a fight right now, even with your troll resilience."

And her whole body shifts to face yours, shoulders falling out of tension. "If you mean... going to sock Terezi in the face, by way of reigniting our little feud... no, that's not exactly what I had planned."

Her eyes fall away, and you don't know if she's trying to process whether you're disappointed in her, or just trying to hide the direction of her destination in her gaze. _Either way it's hiding, though._ You've had enough evasiveness for one morning already.

"The other day. You meant for that to be a date, right? I realized that you must have last night, given how you were talking to me, how you reacted to me, and complimented my body." You drag out the last word, extending a forefinger upward idly. Your other hand meets your elbow, and you try to put on a coquettish face. "When do I get one of those when I'm not distracted with my own nonsense and you're not spraying blood on my hardwood floors?"

Vriska's face blooms the adorable blue color with which you've become familiar, and she wraps her arms around her torso, fingers touching both elbows in a double-mirror of your gesture. Her eyes flick up, meeting yours, and her unreadable expression belies something between excitement and seasickness. But in lieu of an answer, she cranes her head in, lips finding yours; you taste her heady appreciation, feel her teeth barely constrained behind it, and you close your eyes to savor the heat. She holds it for a good second, pressing in to flit her tongue across your mouth as she pulls away, drifting a distance out.

"You're right, it was a date. And you might even be right about what you think I want, even if it did take you a while to clue in to it. But it'll have to wait." You reach out for her hand as she slips back, but she throws both skyward in an exaggerated shrug.

"Vriska, don't do this. I'm not, I'm not angry, just-- talk to me!" You resist the urge to float closer, to keep chasing until you catch her or exhaust yourself trying. But you read into her movement a reticence, like a caged cat, and you wonder if it's from a residual hatred of sunlight or merely being asked to stay.

"Would love to, Harley, but you're outta luck. Because I borrowed the last of that soup from your fridge, and I'm still voracious. Bye!" She bursts off, leaving you in dust again. In your surprise, you don't even have the wherewithal to ask for your hat and shirt back.

"I have food," you pout, stamping your dirt-covered tennis shoes against air. "Taaalk toooo meeeee." But Vriska is gone.

You plop back down in your backyard, gazing over a half-weeded plot, which you've suddenly lost most of your motivation for finishing. So you pull out your phone, and tap out a quick series of texts to Kanaya.

JADE: heyyyyy :D  
JADE: if its no trouble can we talk  
JADE: in person??  
JADE: :D :D  
JADE: i can be free whenever!!!

She doesn't respond, so you go inside to read until your heart stops fluttering and the fireflies evacuate your stomach.

You flop down onto the couch by the door, picking up your tablet for a new novel you picked up recently, not even your usual genre, before your life had its own romantic prospects. You pop open the reader app, and you see the cover, a green-blooded troll prone in the lap of her blue-blooded suitor, eyes closed. The seated troll, scowling around a mass of black hair, instantly seems to you terrifyingly close.

_That instant connection you felt, and you DID feel like you could share so much, even through the anger about June... the shiver at your spine when you realized that any word she said made sense, the way she gazed at you in the park, practically begged your forgiveness, and protested when you hauled her out of that tree like a kitten..._

The tightness hits you again, starting in your back and traveling up your side to your chest, so you try to breathe, mouth open, hoping to settle back down.

_The way you fretted over her, changed her dressings; the way she teased and taunted you about her state of undress, and how flustered you became; how she gobbled down your soup, how she held you close to her flesh as she just rested in your bed..._

Your head feels heavy, eyes watering despite yourself.

_No, Jade, don't be like this. You've talked to her twice. Down, girl._

You set the tablet back down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright we're 10,000 words in (15K if you count the other fic too) are we #slowburn yet


	5. The Diurnal Resolutions of Green Women

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stress-sleeping samoyed superhero seeks strident support from Space sylph.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Illustration](https://twitter.com/xirvennak/status/1148707438989914113) by [@xirvennak](https://twitter.com/xirvennak/). Used with permission.

When is it appropriate to save someone who does not want you to? When do you step in, no matter their objections, or tell them the thing they need to do to fix their life?

When do you let them slam nose-first into that wall, knowing it will cause them pain? Maybe there is never a time like that. Maybe when they call you a meddler, what they really mean is that they are mad at you because they did not realize what they needed before you did.

About an hour after you receive her texts, you pull up the long driveway to Jade's neck of the woods, and park by the greenhouse, all rounded edges and abundant leaves bursting against the glass exterior. It is only a half-hour drive-- a little less, on most days-- but you took your time walking home to retrieve your scuttler, a shimmering, carmine red one, with a roll-down top and sizeable engine. True, its landspeed is lower than yours at full tilt, given your Drinker Fastness, but as you cannot fly there is something to be said for arriving in style.

You, Kanaya Maryam, pull off your sunglasses, shut down the purring engine, and exit the car.

Through the glass in her front door, you can see Jade: splayed out on the couch, still in her gardening sneakers, snoozing away. Her high-waisted, highwater jeans meet a sleeveless button-down shirt, loose-flowing for garden work and black for style. Her hair, in a high, loose ponytail, billows to her side across the loveseat, over the arm propping her up against its back. Even her gardening gloves made it no further inside than the floor nearby, in a tiny heap. The dog-girl's ears and the tip of her tail flick, and the corners of her mouth move with restless dreams. The reading tablet so perpetually at her fingertips is on, displaying the full-color cover of some rainbowdrinker novel or another. You wonder if you might even have read it, before your attention snaps back to the task at hand. Five quick raps on the door with a knuckle, and your fellow space player is bounding to answer it, shaking sleep from her eyes even as she creaks it open.

Jade fixes you both some almond scones with orange marmalade of her own making, and you sit at her breakfast table, part of her spacious anteroom adjacent to the kitchen with the front garden visible just out the window. You wonder if she does it on purpose, but Jade has, every time you have ever sat down at this table, taken to the spot most comfortable for viewing her plants.

"So... I know I say this every time you're over, but your scuttlebuggy is just... so cute! it suits you so well and I love it!"

"Thank you! Once, when Vriska thought I was not listening, I heard her call it my 'Vampire Midlife Crisis Mo8ile', and I loved it so much I think I am naming it that. Likely she was forgetting my Rainbow Drinker Super Hearing."

Jade laughs. "Is that even a thing??"

You shrug, eyes closed. "Does it matter?"

But the young woman across the table from you crosses her arms, expression growing serious. "Vriska was just here, actually. She's what I wanted to talk to you about." You automatically begin checking her over for injuries, eyes grazing limbs and upper torso for slashes or marks. But she appears unharmed.

Jade notices, and gives you a sidelong glance. Then she details to you her night: how Vriska, blood drained almost to the point of death, collapsed into her arms in this anteroom, and she carefully fed her and ministrated her back to health over the late, late night. And they slept in each others' arms.

"...And then this morning, she stole my hat, hoodie, and some soup on the way out the door, and tried to fly off without saying goodbye. When I caught up with her, she gave me a goodbye kiss, but wouldn't tell me what I can do if I..." she pauses, trying to formulate the words 'need to date her'. Words you yourself have thought in this specific context, but you try to put it out of your head. That was a while ago, long enough that you can probably help Jade without fear of your own feelings getting in the way...  
Right?

"You want to see her again?"

"It's funny, I couldn't place it. We talked over the June situation in the park the other day-- apparently you told her how I was doing on that front, so thanks-- and as we did..."

You find yourself taken aback. Surely you did not do something wrong, casually mentioning to a friend... well, semi-ex... that perhaps another friend's ill-considered words had hurt a third? Then Vriska took this information and sought Jade out? This is very irregular.

You tune back in just as Jade's story gets to the part you do not understand yet. "--alized that she had been crushing on me pretty heavily, all night, and I guess also when we were just chatting days ago?" But she notices your distraction. "Sorry, Kanaya. Is something wrong?"

"Was your thanks for me sharing your discomfort with her... sarcastic or sincere?"

"Oh, geez, you HAVE been spending all your time with Rose. No, definitely not sarcastic; maybe I'd feel differently if we hadn't hit it off, but actually I'd rather thank you for helping us meet!"

"Oh. Ohhhh. Apologies, continue."

"...No, that was it. It seems like she must be... kinda, into me, and keeps making these flirty comments and then lets her guard down just enough that I can believe it, but how on earth do you get Vriska's attention?"

"I have only known Vriska to fall hard for... well, honestly, people who punch her in the face."

This was, clearly, not the answer Jade anticipated. She gives a few languid blinks-- forgivable, as it sounds like she forewent any sleep last night-- and you decide to take a different approach.

"Allow me to rephrase. Do you like her?"

Jade ponders this, and you take the time to finish your first little round scone. They are slightly dry, but the marmalade complements them perfectly, and you reach for a second. She is not eating, and you idly wonder if all four she brought out were for you, but think it better to pace yourself.

"Uhhhh. I mean, when I realized she was actually hitting on me, it helped contextualize a lot of the stuff I'd been feeling, actually. Stuff like... I accused her of making me feel 'emotionally compromised', which I guess is sort of like that, and--"

"No. No, Jade. Do not math this out; it is not solveable from the inputs of a conversation or some calculus of interaction." You wave your marmalade-speckled knife lightly from side to side, getting a bit on the tablecloth. "It is not about her attitude, or your reaction to it. How do you FEEL?"

Her almond-shaped eyes, tremendous under her high-power glasses, blink again, this time with surprise rather than fatigue. "About Vriska?"

"About Vriska."

You would imagine that Vriska, though passionate, and sometimes violently defensive, could never hurt a single hair on this girl's sweet tufted ears. But perhaps you would have said that about poor Tavros likewise, maybe even due to that same endless well of passion. Above all else, however, Vriska values emotion in others as well, when underscored with a drive to act and skillful competence, and in that regard you have no doubt that Jade ranks above any other suitor Vriska has ever had. Well, aside from yourself.

"Well, she's never done a thing for me. Technically, saved my life, I guess? But it didn't really seem like that was her goal with it, so." She ponders, but you raise your instructive knife again.

"But sometimes our feelings are not underpinned with their past actions, but instead our passionate hope for future ones. What do you want, Jade Harley?"

Jade takes a deep breath through her nose, releases it over a five-count through her mouth.

"Maybe, okay, what I really want is for her to be the Scorpio to my Lupus... the Lepus to my α-Canis Majoris..." Her elbows meet her upper thighs as the silly girl slouches, and a wistful, thoughtful look spreads across her face, one you have not seen since she was thirteen. Her head tilts ever so slightly, ponytail bouncing with it, and her closed lips crawl into the slightest smile.

You have no idea what she is referencing. June once tried to show you a film by the title of "Night of the Lepus", but aside from the delightful rampant bloodshed you found it too cryptic, too nuanced. You suspect that Jade is talking astronomy, and if the objects she listed were not most likely suns you would suggest that she is beaming like one. As it is, you understand perfectly, and you nod vigorously, with the only response that makes sense.

"Sounds like you have, as Rose once accused me of having for her, 'got it bad.'"

She breaks out into a full grin, unreservedly. "Stop it."

You find yourself infected, and crack a grin of your own, but it sours a moment later.

"But you said Terezi was her assailant."

"Yep. Scourge Sister Number Two has returned. Are they going to... is there gonna be more brutality between them?"

"Most likely, yes."

One of Jade's hands rubs the sweat off her neck. "I hope that doesn't complicate... what I want."

You purse your lips. If this young woman is truly this serious about her crush, you hope what you are about to tell her will not dismay her too badly.

"I... frankly, I cannot imagine Vriska ever finding a way to sublimate her intensity and fervor into a nonviolent matespritship. As I once counselled Karkat, she is much too focused and self-absorbed, and would have to learn how to prioritize other people. I could not foresee anything short of total acclimation to this planet helping otherwise; that or the truly unlikely, some alternate self-knowledge nonsense. Not that Vriska is the type." You swear you see one of Jade's ears flick, but her gaze remains stoic.

"And I do not," you continue, "only say this due to my conflicted nature as her..." You forget the human term, twice snapping your perfectly manicured fingers attempting to recall it. So you use the troll one. "Antiquated heating source."

"Her... old flame? Whaaaaaaaat??" Jade stares, leaning forward in her chair again. "No way-- oh god and I just sat here GUSHING to you about-- oh god..." She covers her eyes with her palms, half-laughing, half sighing with mortification.

"No apologies necessary." You rise, having finished the last scone, and brush free the single crumb that found its way into the folds of your dress. "You did not know, I did not tell you, and that was very many sweeps ago. But it does lend me some degree of... sympathy for your situation."

"Thaaaank you, Kanayaaaaa" she murmurs, forehead resting against the edge of the table.

"Plus, this situation is rather easier, for I am not doing this on an extended basis, and I am not your auspistice-- I have been asked to do that for Vriska before and it NEVER works out for me."

"Yeah. Of course, no worries. I'd hate to put you in the position of the village three-wheel device."

"Three...?"

"Y'know. Auspistice, clubs. The symbol looks like it's got three little... wheels."

"Oh. How odd. Well, if all else fails, direct action and straightforward approaches have always been key to getting Vriska to cease her mindgames. I once almost upended a load gaper over her head, when she was bullying a mutual friend."

"Did it... work?"

"She neither ceased bullying him nor began dating me, but it DID make me feel better."

"Step in the right direction, then."

You see yourself out to your scuttler, politely wave to Jade as she resumes her afternoon's caretaking of plants, and make your way back towards the city. With all the other upheavals looming around your social circle, you were hoping to reserve some meddling for those who needed it the most... and you hope you do not need to save Jade, from Vriska or from her own decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Fun' fact: three of the alternate titles I considered for this fic were 'Uranium Blue and Fluorine Green: The Harley-Serket Conciliation', 'Green Sun, Yellow Sun, Blue Dice, White Dog', and 'Dognapping: Stealing the Heart of Homestuck’s Preeminent Furry'.


	6. That Gnawing Sound

Your name is Vriska Serket, and you may have-- for the first time in your entire life!-- fucked up.

You have been hanging around this cosmic dirtball for a few months, now, and as usual wherever you go the ladies fling themselves at you. After all, your string of past conquests, romantic or otherwise, would take a recitation so extended, so embarrassingly unhumbling, that you basically don't bother to recount it anymore when any of these Earth-C cretins ask you why you're so great. But recently, you've been less and less impressed with your accomplishments, more anxious to prove yourself again. You tell yourself that you feel this way because this universe is just a waiting room, a springboard into your newest adventure.

It didn't feel like home, until you went to bang on Terezi's door.

Ah, Terezi. Co-conquerer of fools! competitor in spectacle and bloodbath! Your precious moirail! Your wonderful... pale red partner.  
Alright, you haven't been feeling your moiraillegiance with her since you've been under the weather with a case of the conscience. Shockingly, okay, this isn't the first time you've ever fucked up.

The first was when you didn't check your phone before you went to square off with the grouchy green giant, because you knew there would be big mushy confessions and it would throw off your focus, cock the dice.

You also aren't looking forward to this meeting because  
you've just spent a lot of time recalling getting stabbed in the back by her, ages ago.

The sword sliding in wasn't even the painful part; as you stumbled and your vision blurred, you realized that what hurt was finding out that she would go through with it.

And then THAT led to your alternative timeline self bawling over some nonsense  
about finding out what kind of person she could be if she were 'happy'.

You showed that abject weenie what happiness brought her: bright red Troll Chuck Taylors imprinting the waffle pattern of their treads on her face. Joke's on you, because the universe decided to foist her side of that memory into your brain, private afterparty of sobbing and blubbering and all. It sucks to lose a fight, but it sucks worse to tell yourself you deserved to.

Two of the biggest owns you've ever experienced, and you've been grappling  
with how much they changed that other 'lucky' girl over the course of her death.

Maybe they both hurt so much because you discovered that at least that little weakling could hang on to the things that mattered to her, and that it would be possible for her to cultivate relationships not based on mutual backstabbing.

No, it was more than that;

you couldn't bare to tell Jade, but when you started to pick up tidbits of light from that timeline, you saw how it all ended. And in those memories, you put your arm around Terezi, and held her close, gazing into the cracked infinite as everything ended, tinny wail of eternity giving way to the

bright white nothingness. And 

she wrapped you up as well,  
as you shared that beautiful and knowing look.

Unguarded.  
Safe.

So when, on the first day you woke up from that sweep-and-a-bit long coma, you poked through your phone, expecting a few tepid outpourings of thanks for saving the literal universe, and 

instead you saw Terezi's extended admission...  


Even when she didn't use the words,  
you knew what it meant. 

(And then she chewed on your ass,  
which only made you more enticed.)

This morning, she threw open the door, 

knowing it was you.  
And she flung her arms around you again,

and it was NOT a moirail-hug.

* * *

The old you would have let Terezi ramble for a while, cage herself in with bet-hedging and rhetoric and the stumbling blocks of face to face communication before sinking your own teeth into her, emotionally speaking. As it is, though, as you are? You thought about it, but you knew that you didn't have time for all that-- and that enough of Terezi's time had been spent not talking to you. So when she tried to say that she had unearthed this powerful memory of the two of you arm in arm at the end of everything, you told her that you knew, and that you yourself had had the fortune to absorb that timeline's dead Vriska, and that while you have no idea how to take in this bizarre planet of leisure time and sunlight and summer dresses, at least you could start from the same script.

She was quiet for a while, then. She asked how in the fuck that was possible, and you shrugged. It's not that you don't CARE, it's just that you have to clean up the pieces anyway, so maybe there's that to focus on instead. She said maybe that was true, but she wondered if she had been the catalyst regardless, and that maybe proximity to a Seer or a Mind player would be enough to unlock that sort of thing.

You really, really are more worried about the present moment, however. And when you wrap your arms around her shoulders, embrace her and cover her face in little pointy kisses she stops speculating, coos weakly, and sinks into your arms, which you had sort of? a little bit? been hoping for.

Mostly you'd been hoping for this, though; this closeness, the unspoken bond, the breakdown of all the insincerity and bullshit. Maybe in the future, there will be time enough for mindgames, to catch up and recollect and bicker and process and breathe. But for now, touch is all you need.

Terezi says, over the course of the day, that she felt like she'd been locked up since you left the platform to go fight mister shiny suspenders-- as she calls him-- and that after however infinitely long she had flown through that endless nothingness, she's suddenly been released back into freedom, dropped on her ass, for absolutely no reason she can discern. And you can tell that it's shaken her a great deal, but maybe you're in a near enough place that you can find a way to understand.

Even now, you have no idea what that means,  
for Vriska Serket's first impulse to be to understand.

It scares the shit out of you, honestly,

then that thought makes you feel weak,

and that thought scares you more...

but when you admit that to her, Terezi takes your cheeks in her hands and squeezes them, just... feeling what your face is shaped like again, runs her hands along your entire torso to relearn every bump, fleck, and bitemark you inherited from the world in her absence. But she stops at the hood of your new sweatshirt, giving it the most inquisitive sniff of all.

So you tell her about your new concupiscent considerations, and to her credit, she listens without accusation, without threat or more than a few cajoling remarks. And even when you refer to your new canine complication as doubtlessly liking you back, she nods, but says that she's happy to hear it, and that it sounds like you're starting to find the ways that Jade makes you happy too.

It's all fucked up, you tell her.

It's bad timing,

it's a bad break,

it's...

Well, normally you'd face up to it, break some hearts, disrupt everything, but this new you, with this awful weak Vriska in your mind explaining everything through empathy and compassion, feels like you're held back from really breaking blood pushers and busting cranial plates. But Terezi sniffs at you, and tells you that the only things that you can recollect from other selves are thoughts, memories, feelings, but never something like a whole separate consciousness in your head, and that the only explanation is that Vriska Serket is developing a conscience on her own.

You're sure you understand what she means. That seductive thought tells you that if you're not being controlled? If your mind is still churning on its own? Then it's not too late to refuse to change, to turn back your personal clock to when winning was all that mattered. And the gears begin turning.

You're grateful not to have to go back to your own windy, empty block, the one pitched up higgledy-wiggledy by your idiot infant self a little less than nine sweeps ago and copied over to this slapdash planet. You crash here for the night, in Terezi's arms, sharing stories of your last great battles and the miniscule little ways in which this planet feels like a futile attempt to refute your lives of conquest and domination. And you start to feel invincible again, feel a bit of that brashness returning. Maybe you're still invulnerable. Even when you disrobe she's nice enough to not mention the sizeable wound in your shoulder, already almost-healed, that she caused.

Yes, your name is Vriska Serket, and you've just committed your second major fuckup ever; you almost fell for two girls in as many days.

But fuckups can be fixed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it time for Terezi Pyrope to get railzoned? (Sadly, the concept's not as sexy as it sounds.) Apologies for Terezi fans who wanted more of her.


	7. The Waves Are High, The Water, Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's 8ack, 8a8y????????

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place after Flame Among Ash cp. 3, for those reading both works.

Two days ago, you, Vriska Serket, resumed dating your 8est on-again-off-again murder8uddy from 8eyond time and space. She told you that you haven't changed a 8it, and that together you can flex your ferocity against all comers, and never need anyone again. (Well, she didn't SAY it. 8ut she definitely IMPLIED it! That Terezi, and her devious mindgames!) Since then, you've had a lot of time to think! Think, and think, and think.

With a 8ounce in your step and a whistle at your terrifying alien gums, you soar off from your respite8lock to check off one more piece of unfinished 8usiness.

Here's the plan, in short: kick down the door of the girl who fell for you, explain that the godawful, failed 8itch trying to take over your 8rain is dead, and since you've got Terezi you have no need for her spacedog antics anymore. Simple! _She'll pro8a8ly cry,_ 8ut them's the 8r8ks. :::;)

You pound on Jade's front door with your fist. Four times, eight, sixteen. Finally, figuring she must 8e upstairs or una8le to hear the door, you just shoulder it open, and as you do you holler with a joyous grin on your face, “8ooty caaaaaaaall!”

Your eyes, however, go eightfold-wide when you realize that your erstwhile crush IS standing in her front room... across the table from her sister, having what looks to 8e a heartfelt conversation over morning tea.

“June,” Jade says with a 8link and a smile, never peeling her eyes from your face. “You… know Vriska.”

“Oh geez,” June remarks.

"There's an expression you humans have," you start, configuring 8oth hands into makeshift pistols and pew-pewing them 8oth at Jade. "It's that some8ody just walked over my grave. Couldn't help the feeling that I was 8eing spoken a8out and decided to pop 8y."

Jade arches an amused eyebrow. "Did you, now? Is that why you seem to never text before you show up, bloodsoaked or no?"

 _Ugh._ You shrug. "Don't have your number, c8n't text much of any8ody."

"You... do still have a phone, right?"

"Na'ah. I threw it into a lake when I finally woke up from that coma."

June, finally 8linking through her em8arrassment enough to notice that you're wearing her sister's sweatshirt, chimes in. "That doesn't sound very good for the planet!"

Well, she's a complic8tion, 8ut always a managea8le one. You've never let a little thing like Eg8ert stand in your way of getting what you want, so you figure she can't throw a wrench into it too 8adly.

"Hey, June!" you respond, with a friendly tilt of the head and smile. "Nice skirt. I need to talk to your sister a8out some things, 8ut... you're free to stick around, if you want."  
The dorkier Harley8ert sister's head turns to look to her si8ling for confirmation, or at least to set the tone, 8ut Jade crosses her arms with a smirk. "Y'know what? We WERE in the middle of something, but that actually sounds like fun. If you're alright with cutting our conversation short, June."

June grins and nods with enthusiasm. "I think I figured out what you were gonna say, yeah." Always good to go with the flow, gotta love her.

"As long," Jade says, wagging a playful finger at you, "as you PROMISE you'll warn me ahead next time you show up to my house. And tell me how you knew that we... were talking about you."

You start off through the kitchen, towards the stairs to Jade's 8edroom, 8ecause you'd rather use that comfy couch for a discussion sure to 8e a pain in your ass. "Simple! I didn't, not for sure. 8ut I DID know that I'm usually the su8ject on everyone's lips."

When the other two finally reach the third floor, you've already stolen the 8ig armchair with its 8ack to the windows, the one 8y the couch and Jade's TV, and are just getting comfy sitting on crossed legs. Jade plops down on the edge of her 8ed, and June sits on the couch in the middle, arms stiff against the seat and propping her up like pylons.

"So..." June starts, desper8 to cut the tension. "Heyyyy, Vriska. What've you been up to since we... talked?"

You shrug, letting your whole 8ody lilt with the motion. "Not a ton; chatted up Terezi, who mauled me, 8ut I happened to stop 8y your sister's and she got me fixed up quick. Congrats on the gender."

"Th...thanks?"

You pause for a moment, and your eyes fall from the scruffy-haired girl to your side down to the floor8oards. _C'mon! New you! Er, old you! C8n't lose your resolve._ You'd 8etter make good on this visit, 8ecause you want to deal with this quickly and you'd rather not get caught up reminiscing with another semi-ex.

Picking up on your reticence, Harley shoots you a look. "Did you... end up going to see her the other morning, after..."

"After you took me in for the night?" You return her glance, and in your periphery June does another confused one-8-y. _Sure to put her off her footing._

"Yeah! I figure you went and gave as good as you got, right? After you said you wouldn't." _Damm8t._

"Y'know, I wasn't lying, actually. I wasn't going to punch her in the face, or fight her! It was spectacular. It was amazing. I felt like the old me again." Your eyes glint, 8rows waggle, and hands flit through the air in acro8atic em8ellishments. "It's actually what I came here to 8r8k to you."

Jade walks over towards you, past her sister, and sits on the near side of the couch. She studies your face, with a quizzical expression on hers. "Are you okay?"

"Jade," you say, giving her your most smouldering look. "She and I are 8ack together, and it's serious this time. Team Scourge are going to scour this planet of weaklings once again."

8ut she laughs, grinning a 8ig toothy nerdy grin. "That's awesome! Like, as of that day??"

"Well, yeah! I showed up, and it turns out we've 8oth 8een doing the, like, other-yous-invading-your-8rain thing, and we..."

8ut Jade thrusts in. Uncomfortably close, now, and her finger indicates your chest, resting at her own. She speaks, cutting you off. "Hit it off after an entire day of honest, fruitful discussion ending in a shared acknowledged attraction past the bullshit and mental barriers?"

She's supposed to 8e openly distraught! You expected her to not 8e a8le to hide the disappointment! But her whole body is coiled in a posture almost celebratory, conspiratorial. The look on her face is exactly like one she wore when she called you on your 8ullshit back in 8ed the other night.  
June is just watching this all unfold, completely 8ewildered, like usual.

You blink-- 8link! dammit!-- once, twice, three times directly into her gorgeous green peepers, still agog right next to your face. June, sitting behind her, is totally unmoving, just trying to process the scenario, and you don't 8lame her for that one 8it; you have no idea how to take this reaction, either.

"Nnnnnnnno! I mean, she definitely helped me see some things str8. She told me that, really, 8rains don't come through, only thoughts and feelings, so I get to choose whether or not I take that other me seriously."  
"Better than I hoped! I was really worried you were just gonna tear each other apart like rabid dogs." She seems... relieved. Full of energy, really.

"Do you... get what I'm saying? We're not moirails." Your back (8ack, ugh!) creaks forward, and you find yourself almost spitting into her face with each fricative and plosive. "We're... we fucked!"

Jade nods. _No, she definitely got that part, okay._ June, however pipes up again. "Wait, you and Terezi... had sex?? How does that even WORK between two trolls?"

This is not how you wanted this conversation to go! This is not the reaction you expected! _Why is she not letting you trample over her????????_

There's a sheer instant for which you consider tamping down the brutal sarcasm bubbling up from your bile chute for Jade's benefit, in case she's putting on a truly spectacular facade and mourning your potential relationship internally. But you decide against it, because hey, better rip that adhesive chitinmender off, right?

"Well, June... it's pretty simple! Our six-foot, tripartite genitals simply unwind and split apart, enravelling each other in a horrorterror union of spreading slime and ecstasy, until we spin our cocoons and fill them with our Life Fluids!" You raise your claw-splayed hands above your head like a wiggler telling a horror story, screwing up your eyes all crazy-like.  
She's eating this up, knuckles white with fixation. _Christ, what a ru8e. Alright, Serket, wind her up, she'll have to get it eventually.  
And better yet, now you can dig the knife in, to see if you can REALLY embarrass Jade._

"No. God, Egbert. C'mon. That's clearly what I do with your SISTER's dick."

"Whaaaat? Vriska!!!" June cries out, face red. Her hands cover her mouth. "What has gotten into you? What are you even talking about??"

Jade, owl-eyed and mouth agape, says nothing, looking rather more like a haunted mannequin exorcised of animating force than an adorable freewheeling doggirl. But she manages to sputter out words nonetheless. "Oh, my god! You are INCORRIGIBLE!" She laughs, whole body rolling with the deep, sonorous cackle of mortification. _Alright, it does SOUND like entertainment, but that makes no sense, so..._

June cuts in once more, head still gimballing from you to her sister. "You guys have-- did you...??? You slept together?"

"We were in the same bed," Jade affirms with a shrug, regaining her spunky tempo without a beat inbetween. "And, if Vriska insists on divulging details I will acknowledge that we were not wearing clothing, but we did not, in fact, have sex."

You shrug, nodding along with the truth. _Gotta give 'em that one!_ But Jade is now giving you that tight-lipped grin, the one that says that you'll have to repay her in honest attention once this is all done with, and you can't help but wonder exactly how that pound of flesh will be extracted. _Hopefully with her teeth._

You feel that twinge, again: the notion that if you just gave her the honest answers to the questions you were being peppered with instead of trying to show8oat and holler and carry on, you'd get a much more fulfilling discussion out of it. _Okay, fine, Vriska. Just put it out of your head. Try to move on, try to not get lost in the little cutenesses, like the way that Jade yips with agreement unconsciously whenever her sister says something funny, or the ways her ears flip when she tilts her head at questions. Most of all, stop falling for her, because she makes you say the most ridiculous things when your heart is pounding and you can't think straight._

But you were trying to make it clear that they should just be done with you, take off for easier prey for their attempts to change people and mold them into boring Harleybert clones. So you break out your last big scare.  
"Oh? That's true, but I'll tell you what: June and I dated, in one of those dreambubbles. So she's really more of my ex than anything, and I'm sure it'd be horribly awkward for you two to share a past partner."

June nods along, shrugging amiably. "Oh, yeah! I remember when you told ME about that. Why would that be weird? I'm strong, I'm independent, I'm happy, and I don't need a girl to make me feel good! Whaddaya say, Jade?"

Jade smirks in agreement. "Sorry, Vee. June and I try to not keep secrets from each other, least of all in the fun stuff like dating."

"(Shit,)" June mumbles aside to herself, suddenly oblivious, with a hand on her chin. "(Am I gay now? Huh. Didn't expect that question to come up.)"

The follicles at the 8ack of your n8ck stand on end, and you tell yourself it's your barely-constrained rage, simmering and boiling just behind your forehead. _How can Jade be so cool about this???? Why is it not driving her CRAZY????  
Is she just like this??_

"Well," June says, smiling and standing with a twirl, stretching her arms up. "It sounds like I should go, and leave you two to talk out some very interesting logistics between you, but... Jade, I gotta ask a question, and... hey, it's not like it could make this any more weird right?"

Jade touches her pursed lips, and drops back against the couch. "Yeah, alright. As long as we're already playing Jade-embarrassment-chicken, go ahead, take your turn."

"Is that... weird for you? Like, the... what Vriska just said about your..." June screws up her face, trying to say it without SAYING it.

So you say it. "Her dick."

Jade nods. "Right, right." _Really?_

June affirms with her own nod, and continues. "Do you get, like... dysphoria about that, sometimes...? See, I wouldn't ask, but... I'm dealing with all this myself, y'know, and I just don't know anybody else who..." but Jade waves her off, not unkindly.

"That's okay. I get why you'd want to know! I mean it when I say I don't have secrets from you, because I love you as my sister. Honestly...? It kinda used to. If it wasn't, like, gender dysphoria, it was something close." She smooths a stray hair from her temple, brow furrowing. She's turned fully away from you, now, but you can't even find it in yourself to be indignant that you're being ignored, because you get to watch her little motions, her little wags and lilts, as she talks about her life.

"I wondered if it meant something really terrible about me, like that my body wasn't my own, or I had to own up to half a life as some kind of deformed freak. But I gave up that awful line of thinking years ago; because I actually love my body, every scar, every toad-wart, and the stuff I know I can't change. And yes, that includes... every little thing I inherited from Bec when he and I got merged by the game. I looked for a long time for ways to decouple myself from it all, but decided against trying when the time came. I'm shaped by my experiences, body and all, and if it ends up written on me, so be it. I'm still me, and I'm still stronger for everything that happens to me. That's not the case for everybody! And it sounds like you should make your body do what you need it to. But either way, it's yours to choose with, okay?"

They hug, then. You think about what that would feel like, for your body to still be shaped by everything that ever wrought hell on it, exploded robo-eye and half-measure robot arm included. You didn't think you'd have to tell yourself not to cry during this, because you knew your heart was made of ice and your tongue was made of fire and you were invincible. You thought. You hoped.

That dull ache comes back, the low yearning that says _you can lie down, and cry, and she will hold you and make it all better and hug you until you become okay again_. No, maybe it never left. Maybe you just tried to starve it with all that cold, before the tightness and burning rushed back in.

But then you remember that you are supposed to be mad, and desperately try to work yourself back up to that mindset as the girls finish their soft chat.

God, you hope you didn't break this. Either that it can be salvaged, or it's so shattered that you get to scream and unravel your monstrous wings and just fuck off straight into the sun. Either way it will mean you don't have to sit with this hurt for too long, because you will be papped and comforted and told you are okay, or because you will ignite in incandescent plasma. _Not that you'd ever do that for real, of course. God._

You tell yourself that you should be steaming with the feeling of being ignored, pushed away; after all, you thought that getting some distance from Jade's adorable little ways of making you comfortable was what you wanted. But before you can even reconcile yourself, both sisters turn to you, smiling placidly, as June says, "sorry, I didn't mean to make this weird. Are you okay?"

You cross your arms indignantly, looking away. God, you hope you're not blushing.

June thanks her sister for letting her open up about whatever you interrupted earlier, and drifts off from the couch, heading towards the ceiling. Jade jokes that she has a very interesting conversation ahead of her, now that she's gotten you to stop trying to embarrass her. You say nothing to June as she laughs and floats up to unlatch the skylight.

"I'll see you later, June," Jade says, before turning her attention to you, wry smile on her lips.


	8. Angles, Curves, Straight Lines, Orbiting Bodies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love to Douglas Adams.

What the fuck is going on?

The lock at your ceiling window clicks shut again, only perceptible to your super-canine-super-hearing. You stand, stretch your legs for a moment, and head over to the alchemization station. A few seconds after you order up a small tea, plain green, it dings out, piping hot. You look across the room, and Vriska's still just sitting there, eyes tracking you as you move, as your hands retrieve your beverage.

You lick your lips in a slow, ruminative gesture.

You were worried something like this might happen. While you don't consider yourself an amazing reader of people, you know when somebody's trying to push you away, push your buttons, or make you feel a certain way, especially when that person has all the personal subtlety of a brick through a downtown windowpane. But Jade Harley does not like to be pushed, will not allow herself to be treated that way anymore, so you turn in place, allowing the silence to suffuse the room, marinate you both.

You walk to the edge of the bed, and seat yourself, gently brushing the fold of your gray dress out of the way of your rear end. "How long's it been since you ate... alchemized food, Vriska? Or had a drink from a replication station."

She shrugs, face returned to neutral. "Erm, nine hours? Little longer. Something to tide me over before bed." You nod.

"That short? You don't strike me as much of one for cooking, I suppose. I don't use 'em anymore. I grow most of my food myself, because I know what I like and I'm good at it, and if you've ever tasted the tea out of these things..." you take a long sip, recalling a passage from one of your favorite novels. "They produce something that is 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.' It'll keep you warm, may provide a few basic nutrients, but it doesn't..." You wave your free hand, letting the saucer the machine thoughtfully provided come to the ground with a sharp clatter, cracking along a median line.

"...it doesn't nourish. You can subsist, but you can't get the blend just right. Our tech just isn't exact, we can't perfectly print out a tea to everyone's preferences, because these machines manufacture the ur-tea, an ideal, some technically perfect tea, but that falls flat for anything other than leaf consistency and monotony of taste."

By now she's getting testy, rocking in her seat. Impatience is written in creases across her forehead. "What the... what on earth are you getting at, Harley?"

You glare. "You didn't need to do all that, just now. The bluster, the theater. You didn't need to yell about my genitals in front of my sister; but you know that already, or at least I hope it's clear that at the very least, that little speech I gave about 'not being ashamed' and 'loving every part of my body'? It wasn't just for her benefit." Vriska's jaw hardens as her muscles clench. "She's trans," you continue, "she doesn't need that fluffy 'love your body' crap. That's just not applicable to her life; she needs to transition, from how she explained it to me. But I want you to know that I'm not scared of you, Vriska. No matter who you think you need to be to prove something to me, or what you think you can do to me to prove something to yourself."

Her shoulders slump like a teenager getting lectured. Which, fine, you suppose, she kind of is. But you figure you deserve a little time in the spotlight after the scene she just pulled, so you cross your arms after another sip of tea. "I knew what I was getting into when I admitted to myself that I am attracted to you, Vriska. And I knew I was for good reasons: I admire your brashness, I like how you speak your mind, and you make reality do what you need it to, for whatever motives you see fit at the time. You flow like water, a characteristic I admire in a lot of people; you don't have to ruminate, you just get shit done."

You're talking about her now, so she's perked up, but still waiting for you to finish before what you assume will be one final display of standoffishness. "See, I thought this was going to be a very smooth conversation, and that we were going to detail our obvious mutual attraction and decide on parameters for a relationship. But it's clear that you were expecting something very different."

You pretzel your legs underneath you, finishing off your still-scorching tea, and place the cup on the floor, in the disused china plate. You turn inward, towards the center line of the bed, and you pat the space in front of you expectantly. "Come sit on the bed. Up here, next to me."

Surprisingly, she follows your instructions, and-- of course, without kicking her shoes off-- sits on the edge of the bed, shoulders still sunk and eyes still focused on you.

"C'mon. Sit with me. I want to see your eyes and I want to talk with you. Face me, please?"

At that exhortation, you see the first crack develop in the mask, the first wince. And she does, lanky troll legs crossing as she shifts towards you, knees just about touching yours. You reach out, and place your hands on them, and she looks at your hands, then back up to your face.

"Is this okay?" She nods, still mute.

"You told me, a week ago, that I needed to be selfish sometimes to survive. I was being surly-- like you are, right now, and I firmly believed that there was something fundamentally pure about me that had to continue to exist and that even if it made me unhappy I had to accept it. That's the metaphor, y'see, of that godawful tea I just forced myself to drink: sometimes, no matter how pure to your truth you think you need to be, all you're doing is making that truth harder for other people to swallow, and you're just making yourself disposable."

Alright, that was all improvised, and you're pretty proud of it. But you also sound like somebody's mom right now, so maybe you can wheel it back to actually talking about something more useful than a cuppa.

But Vriska sees you, in that moment, and blinks. And says something you knew was coming, even if it causes the same throbbing pain all over again, deep in your chest, regardless. Her voice is raw, as though she's said it ten thousand times in rehearsing this exact instant. "It'd be easier... This whole thing would be easier if you would just hate me already."

"Yeah. I can see why that'd be easier. You get to be purer, I get to subsist. But I don't want to subsist, I want to find joy, cultivate my own leaves and grow every flower I can, do more than sleep away my days and cry away my nights in loneliness and solitude. And I think you do, too."

She shifts, trying to flatten her feet out under her thighs to ease a little bit of the discomfort she feels. But you don't have advice for her right now, because no amount of clothing removal will get her off the hook for this particular ache, not until she listens to what you have to say.

"I get to be selfish, right now," you say, putting your head closer to hers. She pulls away a bit, so you sit back up, not moving either hand from her knees. She's not brushing you away, so you turn them slightly to meet the curvature of her kneecaps, to rest in place. "Because I'm angry."

Your eyes stare into hers, swapping from her full pupil to her clustered seven and back, but after one blink she holds the gaze with you. You might be imagining it, but you almost see a tinge of blue, where humans get the aching red seeping into their eyes when they're about to bawl. "I'm angry with you, and that stunt you just pulled, and we both get to sit with that for a while, and feel it."

You think your tone of voice conveys that adequately, even and measured and slow, and clearly from her rapt attention Vriska agrees. She breaks her slightline for an instant, letting it fall to the bottoms of her shoes, but looks back up when you speak again. "What are you afraid of, Vriska? What is the thing that you fear will happen if you don't drive me away from you? Or, I guess... get the blackrom you're looking for, or whatever motive you had for this whole... morass."

She sits for a while, practically frozen and lips tight. But you're comfortable with silence, and so you wait until she's ready to speak.

"What if... what if I'm not Vriska anymore? What if there's nothing inside that, and I'm... nobody?"

"What does that mean, to 'be' Vriska?"

She sighs, dragging a finger across her lips and gums. "It's... if I had to guess, it's that I have to win. I can't just live on a gritty little shithole backwater like this, I have to be somebody who means something."

You nod. That's about what you expected, honestly. "I don't know much about psychology, actually. But if I were gonna diagnose you, I'd say you have... Because She's Vriska syndrome. Because everybody, for your whole life, has told you that, right? You blinded Terezi, that's just Vriska. You KILLED Tavros, that's just Vriska. You fed babies to your giant spidermonster, that's just Vriska."

She nods in time, following, agreeing with the fundamental Vriskocity of these statements, their deep and abiding Vriskaness. You continue. "Every story I was ever told made you out like this elemental being, this storm of force that just shreds anything that ever attempts to get close to it, and I bet you believe that to its core. I don't, because I don't think anybody's particularly LIKE anything. I think we all just do shit, and if people admitted that they'd be better off for it."

You bite your lip and slide a hand up and down Vriska's knee maybe a quarter inch, and she places her own hand on top as it comes back to rest in the same spot. "And if you admit that maybe, you're starting to get close to a few people and are scared you'll hurt them, and you need to push us away because you think we won't like that core 'you', that sounds like an awful fuckin' problem to have. I don't envy you, Vriska Serket."

"But," you say with a nod, and a pat to the hand resting on yours, "I do still like you. Even if you felt the need to bullshit me today because you were scared. I don't have to accept that-- because it's awful mindgame shit-- but if you'll at least say you're sorry and promise to work on it, then it's behind us already. And either way, I don't hate you. Not in the fun way, not in the bad way."

Vriska looks away, and turns her body again, back towards the open room. You pull your hands back, waiting for her to be moved to... something, but she slumps back down to the same posture as before. "Sounds like you know me real fuckin' well, Harley."

"Na'ah. Like I said, nobody's 'like' anything. You just do the things you need to do, no different from anyone else."

"Sounds like you think I'm a broken-ass fuckup, actually. A fixer-upper to ride around town and brag about changing. You want me to change."

"You're not a fixer-upper, and you're not a failure. You're just a person. A fucked up person, but hey." You shrug. "As you've previously pointed out, some of us have our own issues and growing up to do, and it's more fun with other people. Hopefully you can agree with that even if you know you'll get hurt just being close to people sometimes."

You release a long sigh, feeling the stress of argument leave the muscles of your chest and neck. "Now let's talk about why we're actually here." Shifting your arms behind you to prop you up, you tilt you head; Vriska looks up to your ears, and sinks backwards into your bed, lying flat. She looks deflated, but also eminently more like the young, luminous woman you met eight days ago, not the ravenous thing that showed up at your door today demanding to be subdued.

"Yyyyeah. You mean, like. Dating." Vriska nods, licking her lips. "About that... it sounds like you're, kinda, done with the Spades thing?"

"Well, yeah. Not for me, I think."

"But I'm already dating Terezi as a matesprit."

"Yep."

"So... I feel like I owe you this talk, but also you don't seem to be catching my drift here, Harley. I'm kinda... taken."

"Taken?" You squeeze one eye shut, caught off guard. "Wow, haven't heard THAT expression in a while. Has poly not worked out for you, orrrr...?"

She looks into your face, clearly trying to work out what on earth you mean. But nope, there's no moment of recognition, no realization. "Poly?"

You sigh, hoping it's not too derisive-sounding, and you put a finger into your opposing palm like a patient teacher explaining a math problem. "Yeah. Dating multiple people at the same time, in one of a number of possible arrangements, not in different 'quadrants' or anything, just, like... romantically."

You see the light come on. She blinks, once, and two more quick ones.

"I've never... done that. Before."

"Well," you say, letting a smile grow across your lips. "That saves me a difficult conversation, actually. Because, surprise! I don't really do monogamy."

But she tilts her chin up again. Another word she's not used to, maybe? She throws her hands into the air. "What the FUCK is monogamy?"

"Hell if I know," you say sympathetically, crossing your arms. "This is one of those troll things, right? You'd be killed on your home planet if you ever tried to fuck two people at once?"

"Noooo...? I mean, maybe. Well, so long as you were filling pails and not getting in trouble with public highblood morals, there wasn't much about such an arrangement that would lead careful trolls to get whacked. Except for the fact that it sounds complicated and messy, I guess."

"That's love for ya'." You lift your head back, slide up against the head of the bed into Rex's arms, and your eyes close, ponytail resting on the bear's broad white nose. "Here. Let me make this simple. I really like you, Vriska Serket. First, I think you're really cute, and I like that you don't seem to take anybody's bullshit. And that even when you're being really defensive sometimes you know when to cut the crap and just... talk to me. I know it's been, like, a week since we even met, but I feel like I've been able to talk to you more than anybody else in the past decade. So, do you want to try this thing, like... dating?"

"Yeah. I do. Y'know, I gotta say, I'm pretty into you too, Jade Harley. It's... been a while since I met somebody who didn't just reflect my shit back at me. Not that I... really know how to deal with pushback. Also, yeah." She blushes, neck compressing. "I also happen to think you're, like, SUPER cute."

You open your eyes again, having thought maybe more equivocation was coming. Maybe you just caught her off guard enough that she didn't have time to think up a good lie. "One thing I really want you to consider, though, is whether or not it'll bug Terezi? Because I don't want to step on your other, y'know, relationships."

Vriska stands slowly, and squeezes her chin, as if trying to massage answers out of it. "I did tell her that you and I... hung out, and she mentioned that she hoped you and I would find some arrangement that worked for us, and it's not like Quadrants were even mentioned, so."

"So tell ya' what." You sit forward, opening your huge green eyes and looking into her own big yellow ones, facing towards the bed again. You beckon, and she puts her knees onto it, sitting just in front of you, between your legs. "Talk to her about it the next time you see her, and make it clear that it's not a hearts-spades-vacillation-type-thing, and that I... " you put a hand to her cheek, and she leans forward, planting a long kiss directly to the center of your lips. "Am looking forward to getting to meet her too, as a meta."

She blinks. "Sorry, meaning?" Vriska Serket sits against one of your thighs, planted against your favorite bear-pillow, and leans towards you on one arm, placing the other by your hip. You assertively pick it up, wrapping her long, gray fingers around the side of your stomach.

"Metamour. 'Other partner', somebody you're not dating in a poly web. Polycule, if you're a dork like me."

The blush on Vriska's face is intense, bloomed across the whole of both her cheeks, but she speaks softly, lips just creeping around a smile. "Well, I'm sorry for how I behaved earlier, then. I don't know what I was afraid of, because you're clearly very real, and so am I, and yet we're here. And I have a lot of words to learn, it sounds like."

You put your arms around her, and she falls forward, head coming to rest just on your shoulder as you laugh, and she closes her eyes. "It's okay," you murmur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jade stop talking poly terms and ethics while you smooch your new girlf is2g


	9. Backscatter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What would it mean for a human brain to have the power to collapse singularities? At what point is that brain no longer human? And worse, who is more affected by that, the goddess or the mourning family?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains depictions of panic attacks and traumatic-stress reactions.

Vriska is, as of this moment, attempting to operate the skylight latch, the same one June left through less than two hours prior. The bottoms of her shoes are planted on the ceiling, and she is yanking at it with some portion of her considerable strength, but without the right finessing the bolt will simply not move. Jade Harley regards her from the bed as she would a performer: she watches exaggerated movements, unguarded grunting, and all that unnecessary and misapplied force have no results before she stands up atop the bed and begins to float upward.

After Vriska had fallen into her arms, they had chatted about nothing for a while longer-- about hair, the ways that Jade untangles hers from her ears, and Vriska hers from her horns; about one's lapsed appreciation for roleplay of an animal nature, the other hers for a more violent sort; about how Jade hadn't been to space in a few months out of a lack of the sensation of wonder it used to provide.

Some time later, Vriska prodded her in the arm, and Jade gasped, the sudden, sharp kind, like a drowned woman being brought back to air. She watched as Vriska blinked, heard her point out that Jade was staring at the plaster moulding on the wall. She hadn't nodded off, she was certainly awake, just... became a little insensate. When she realized this, she drew her knees up to her chest, as if to protect her core, and wrapped her arms around them, nose buried between. "It's nothing," Jade had insisted. But Vriska asked what Jade needed, and she had thought, in that moment, that if she HAD needs-- and was thankful that she didn't-- they would be to sink into the earth, planted like a sapling and watered like a grapevine, and to sleep for a thousand years.

This was when Vriska stood, told her they were going, and flew up to the ceiling to attempt to open their aerial escape hatch.

In the present, Jade arrives at the window, arms held close to her body, curled in like a young frog still gawky from its tadpole days. With a swift flick of the wrist she undoes the stuck pin. Vriska tosses the skylight open, and extends a hand towards Jade, watching her reaction. But Jade floats by, not watching much of anything as she exits her home into the daylight.

Jade's thought process had gone something like this, in the period of time before she found herself lost in the drywall.

_If my mind is a mechanism, I can turn it back, look to its earlier states, see how it operated, why it did the things it did. I had a week to ruminate about who Vriska was, yes. I had a number of stories to pluck from, brains to borrow ideas from, friends to mine for information, true. I had built-- I thought-- a competent understanding of this person with whom I felt instantly connected, and I knew it was coming; but when the time came, I still couldn't bring myself to bear on the problem without shutting down the part of me that could feel._

She could see it written out, like an equation on a blackboard in her mind. 'Vriska believes she is the sort of person who must lash out at those around her. She believes this because inside of her is the knowledge that if she cannot be Winning-- every war, every relationship, every fight-- there is nothing there for people to love.' That had been the solution to a weeklong test, the final piece slotting in to make sense of the inequality. When she lashed out, Vriska had proved Jade's thesis: that spidertroll believed there was a monster inside of her that nobody could embrace, or tend to, or even acknowledge.

Jade knew that core fear well, that nobody could bear the void inside of her, the lack-of-a-person capable of crushing everything that strayed too close in its singularity. She once had a therapist ask if she thought people valued her for anything other than her enthusiasm and her willingness to do their dishes for them; Jade Harley still has no answer to that question.

But Jade let herself wonder: if she could tend to this great, primal need of Vriska's, help show her that even the worst parts of herself were beautiful and worthwhile, perhaps she could see her way clear to alleviating her own misery.

_For once_ , she thought, _maybe it doesn't feel like a responsibility to fix someone. Maybe I'm taking on the opportunity for my own benefit._  
 _But then... she was right, and I was trying to fix her. I am._ And the thought sent Jade spiraling, as she sat fixated on the walls.

And now she's perched on the edge of her sloped roof, looking off into the northern horizon, back garden in view. Vriska slides down the tiling towards her, coming to rest with her legs dangling right off the edge. She kicks her feet gently.

The troll finally speaks, voice cutting through the early-afternoon quiet and birdsongs. "I won't ask over and over, but I can wait until you want to talk about whatever it is you've realized that's sent you all quiet."

Jade slowly turns her head towards Vriska, as though lugging it with a great effort, and her expression looks just short of pained. "You don't want to be here." Vriska hears in Jade's voice a sudden dullness, like Equius used to have when he had been caught lusting after some rustblood or another. He would sound almost... mechanical, downsampled, like a voicemail greeting. She doesn't like it.

Jade continues. "You can leave, if you want. I wouldn't blame you if you did, and I'm used to it, I'm used to coping by myself. You might go..."  
"Nope. You pantsed me fair 'n' square, Harley, and that means you get one wish. Not like I'm gonna run from a fight even when I know it's more than I can handle." She rocks from one jeanpocket to the other.

"Mmkay," the witch mutters, eyes glassy. "It's usually... too big, when I try to tell people about it."

"Fuck it. I'm indestructable."

Jade sighs, body unmoving, gently masticating the sides of her tongue. Vriska wraps her arm around Jade's back, resting at the shoulder, and she cranes her head forward into Jade's line of sight. With a look of recognition the ragged woman lets the arm at her side help hold her up.

"Vriska... have you ever had that feeling, where you know cerebrally that you're, like, brutally enraged at somebody, but you still know you have to hold it back, just because you know that you have the power to just..." she sizes her fingers together, as if gripping the trunk of a tree in the distance, and tenses them to squeeze against nothing. "Pop them like a grape? So you just smile, and nod, and say the right words, so carefully, so eloquently, and betray nothing of your real feelings underneath. And they believe you because, for that moment, you're doing such a good job of hiding in yourself that even you think you have no anger for them, and you feel only good will?"

Vriska watches, arm still wrapped around Jade's shoulders, but says nothing.

"I'm very good at that. I always have been. I've been the only caretaker for as long as I can remember, for myself, for Dave, Karkat, for June..." She shakes her head, cutting the list of names short. "And my sole role in everyone's lives for, just, as long as I've ever been around them, is only to smile and feel nothing and to make sure they're fed." She sniffs, a wet, phlegmy sound, and wipes her eyes on the neck of her dress. "And I'm really good at it."

"I doubt that was a thing you took on because you wanted to," Vriska admits. "Sounds like the only way you could make it."

"I'm sorry. I don't want to unload on you, it's just that today brought a lot of that back. And I thought I was doing better, y'know?"

"Don't worry about me. I know what I did. I'd rather let you air this out, because that emotional constipation is part of the problem, sounds like."

"And June was by earlier, just only talking about herself, and wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise, and you were..." she trails off, teething her bottom lip, and Vriska wonders if Jade is about to try to let her off the hook again. "In need of some help, and we talked about all that."

"And... you? Where's Jade in there, exactly?"

The dog-girl presses her glasses up the bridge of her nose again, but wiggles it in clear discomfort. Her ears fold down.  
Vriska's hand squeezes her collarbone, and Jade tenses it, but with a labored sigh lets it release.

Vriska speaks again. "You said you were angry, earlier. And I'm actually glad about that, because I don't know how the fuck else you could feel about all this. But you sure didn't show it at the time. And even when you said you were being selfish, and we sat, and you said eeeeverything you needed to, I still don't know how I'd be able to tell that you're angry with me, if you hadn't said it."

"I can't SHOW it..." Jade says, sounding utterly defeated.

"Why not? I love it when people are angry at me, I think you successfully identified that earlier. Even if it's not about, well, driving you off, like you said."

Jade nods a small nod. "It's because of all that stuff we talked about last week. I don't get to just... be mad at people, they hurt themselves or I hurt them when I let it show."

"You think I'd do that?"

"I don't know you yet. Can't take the risk."

"Well, gimme a chance, at least. Let me fuck it up for myself, don't tell me I lose before I'm even up against the challenge."

Jade clacks her jaw a couple times, ruminating on that. It's hurt her before, trying to unload on somebody who had to flee, who couldn't take the bulk of the weight from her shoulders that she had willed herself to feel again, leaving her just burdened with none of the catharsis. She forces herself to take a deep breath, letting her diaphragm expand just to feel the muscles relax as she exhales.

"That feeling... when you're tamping down the parts of you that have lots of emotion about everything, every nerve, every fiber of you that screams about anger or frustration or sadness or whatever, you just know that... it's like when you run too hard, too far, and lactic acid builds up in the muscles, and topples you over eventually. You can take it for just so long before it overwhelms you and shoves you down. Like I said, I'm REALLY good at pushing through it, so sometimes I can get through entire... villain monologues before I have to curl up in a ball and let myself not-cry back into feeling again. I was hoping you'd have left by then, honestly."

Vriska sniffs, rubbing under her nose. "But you knew this was coming even when you... asked if we were gonna try dating?"

"Yeah. I guess, in the back there somewhere, I was aware of it, even if I could still say everything I needed to say, what I knew my real wants were. It was coming."

"But then it broke out again, when we cuddled and talked about silly little things, and even still you made sure I was satisfied and felt forgiven."

Vriska lets off with her stabilizing arm, and Jade sits up again. The hoodie-clad troll drifts off the roof, flying into the open air, and reaches out a hand, willing Jade to drift up with her. The seated girl makes a face like a dog tasting a lemon drop, but puts her hand into Vriska's, fingers touching outstretched palm. "C'mon," Vriska chides. "This has been enough sitting around. We'll keep talking, but you should get some physical activity, it'll help bring you back from ghost-world."

"Hmm." With a grunt, Jade takes off, and once she's floated up unrecumbs her body, stretching legs out. Vriska takes her hand, closing her own into it now, and flits back, like a salsa dancer on one foot. The unexpected force of her pull, coupled with Jade's airborne form, spins her around, dress twirling, and she finishes the twirl against Vriska's chest with a soft oof. Once she realizes what she's been drawn into, Jade laughs, tone somewhere between disbelief at the cliche and skepticism that Vriska is pulling this on her, right now, as she details her detachment and disorientation.

"I've never danced, but you humans sure have a lot of totally inappropriate scenes of it in your awful movies, so I figured if I twirled you around a bit I could at least get that laugh."

But instead, Jade's shoulders nestle inward, skycuddling the top of her head against Vriska's chin. "This is nice, actually. Maybe more spinning in a moment, but for now I'd like to catch my stomach for a bit longer if your plan is to fling me around."

Vriska laughs, repositioning her jaw against the white floof of Jade's ears. "Yeah, alright. But if you barf it'll be on your own hoodie." The pair of them gently rise, above the treetops, creeping toward the cloudless skies. "You asked if I've ever had that rage, that inexpressable fury. My answer to you is, nope. I haven't. Lying about any other big feelings, I get, but bottling up anger... it's just not in me. I have to live it out, every time, let myself scream and claw and beat the shit out of people." She smiles a bared-tooth smile.

"...That sounds impossible, to me. Not just hard, but unfathomable."

"Psh. It's easy once you make your life revolve around it, teach everybody that that's how you do things. Heck, I learn so much about people when they're past their breaking point with anger."

Vriska's mind turns back to the other times she tried to soak up somebody else's hatred, in order to square them into comprehensibility. Hell, with Aradia, things worked out great, if she ignores the mutual murder. Terezi, obviously, and she's excited for more of that. Karkat doesn't count-- his attempts were always self-flagellating, rather than lashing out-- but he still had his unguarded moments.

"And you," she continues, free finger rising up to boop Jade on the nose, "should have space to give as good as you get when it comes to people making demands of your feelings. S'only fair."

Jade crinkles her nose. Vriska still finds it the apex of adorable dog-behaviors, and laughs a bit. But the girl in her arms pauses for a second to think, before she replies. "Sure, that sounds good... but what do you do if you're locked inside your own chest, standing at the window looking out as your auto-pilot tells everyone that everything will be OK and that you can always fix it?"  
"No idea. I bet it depends on what puts you into that state in the first place."

As they swoop upwards, a lone meandering stratocumulus trundles by, and Vriska guides their path through it, poofing through the other side. Jade laughs, clearly enjoying the feeling of letting her head brush the clouds again, and tucks a leg between Vriska's as they ascend.

"Well... you won't like it, but I can tell you exactly what that was, this time 'round."

"I can take it. I'm a biiiiiiiig girl."

"It's whenever I feel like I'm being... taken over? Like, somebody's trying to manipulate me for their own benefit, and I'm powerless to do anything other than sit and watch. Or when I have to tell the really awful sorts of lies, the self-protective ones, just to stave off somebody else's anger." The pair separate a bit, and Jade draws back from the hug.

"And I can see why you'd feel that way about me today, yikes."

"It... it was that, yeah, but also I wasn't maybe truthful with you. I think..." Jade sighs, and shudders, and Vriska tries to bring her up and level so she can get a good look in her eyes.

Jade rises up, arms at her sides, hands clasped in front of her chest. But her gaze falls away, and in that moment Vriska wonders if she's shrinking with her powers or just doing her best to look very small. "...I think I knew that when you said I was just trying to fix you, that... maybe a little bit of that was true."

"I... I'm..." Vriska finds the reassuring words she needs suddenly stuck in her throat, completely swallowed.

"And I don't think you're broken! And I don't think that it's my only motive, or that I need every part of you to change. But you did scare me!" Jade gulps a huge breath. "And when I lied about that I realized I had to lie about changing you, and I..." she shivers, eyes squeezed closed, but Vriska wraps her up in her arms, firmly. She guides Jade's head in to rest at her shoulder, closing her own eyes in turn. "...I felt trapped, and it felt so awful, and I just..."

Jade shudders and sobs, burying her nose in Vriska's shoulder and making an absolute mess of the borrowed sweatshirt. But Vriska says those eight little words she thought she would never utter to another being. "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay... It's okay."

They turn together in the jetstream, but Vriska has no idea how to comfort a crying friend, so she settles for gentle circles on the lower back with one hand, light headrubs with the other, and a few gentle platitudes in the meantime.

Jade blows her nose against Vriska's sleeve, after a time, and with a great exhalation stifles her crying. She pushes away, not with rage but with impulse, and grabs both of Vriska's hands. "C'mon. Let's go. I know where I'd like to be."

Both women shoot off through the stratosphere, hand in hand, guided increasingly by Jade's space-acceleration powers over their mutual capacity for flight. Vriska has only experienced this kind of raw speed vicariously, and Jade's grasp feels nothing like riding a meteor through space: she can feel the witch's pulse quicken as they dash, watch the curving scenery slowly fade from placid blue to adventurous darkness.

Vriska can just see Jade's mouth curl up into a grin as they break through the outermost layer of the planet's gravity together. Jade speeds them up, then, the speckled stars smearing from points of dim light into vivid slashes punctuated with passing near-earth objects of indeterminate sorts. Bolting in the direction most opposite the sun, Jade guides their two bodies along a precarious curve away from Earth C. She pulls out her phone, speaking a direction into it. "Set a timer; four minutes, twenty-four seconds."

Vriska does wonder, idly, if she's about to get her wish of being thrown directly into the sun, but Jade speaks as they soar through the vast, inky blackness. "Oh, and don't worry about Lorentz-factor time dilation. Did you know my powers can actually account for that? My own little time-manipulation! Which is good, because otherwise in the time we're traveling only point-three-seven seconds would have passed on earth."

She giggles, but it's all Vriska can do to stammer. "Uh, no, I wasn't worried about that, no."

Jade's eyes have regained their brightness, and her head starts to turn and gimbal as they fly, clearly taking in more than Vriska can even see. And she evidently locates the target of her search soon after, as she adjusts their course and breaks out into another excited lesson.

"I had a textbook, as a kid, one I pored over thousands of times in the years when I should've been in school. It had every little distance, down to the thousand-kilometers, for every orbiting body in the entire solar system, and I knew every one of them by heart, as of three years ago. It was the book that taught me that if our sun went out, we wouldn't know for eight-point-three minutes, because the light would have to travel that long." Her reminder wristband beeps, signaling her timer's end, and she taps it.

It's her turn to bring Vriska to bear, now. As Jade slows their speed back down to a scale comprehensible to the other young goddess, she spins her around by the hand and embraces her waist, much as Vriska had to her. Her breath is warm against the troll's ear, mouth inches away. "When we hopped to this universe originally, we hadn't pocketed the other planets from the Sol system, so I had to build a little something from scratch, but I knew every one of those distances by heart." Jade puts a hand out, under Vriska's shoulder, and she points to a great red planet, beginning to loom large on its incoming orbit, though its movement is invisible against the black backsplash of the cosmos.

"We flew at speed C for four-point-four minutes, which means we're just past the orbit of Mars now. It's funny, I had to look up the diameters and masses of Phobos and Deimos to be sure I got the right-sized moons to keep the system from just all falling apart over tens of millions of years, but I think I did okay." Split fingers, tracking the motion of two much smaller spheres, point to the rocky gray blobs themselves crossing between Vriska's vision and the fourth planet.

"Ooh, wait here!" Jade declares, decoupling from the hug before zooming off towards one of them.

Vriska holds her hands at her stomach. She can't say she understands more than half of what Jade's saying, but only wants to soak in every word, to let each suffuse her with secondhand wonder and joy. If she were with anybody else-- someone less enraptured, more acrimonious, less intimate-- Vriska would be sure she had just been space-ditched, but she knows she has nothing to fear from Jade. Still, she consciously refrains from asking, on Jade's return, how fast a non-lightspeed godtier could travel back to Earth from here.

Jade comes back, one of the moons hovering just a foot above her palm. Vriska hadn't noticed it moving, given the graceful sweep with which Jade had plucked it down and scaled it as she flew.

"It's Deimos! Second moon of Mars. But my personal favorite between the two, don't tell Phobos." Vriska laughs, utterly charmed, and stares in amazement for the moment it takes Jade to float the planet back, resize it, and set it perfectly to motion around its mother body.

But Jade finds herself frowning upon her return. "When I say that I think most people only value me for what I do for them, it's not... a dig at myself. It's a matter of scale. I built their solar system for them, from scratch, with an eleventh-grade astrophysics textbook and a great deal of solid rock. And, I suppose, the waning connection with an ultrapowerful green sun that made the travel of four-point-five billion kilometers to Neptune trivial." Jade sighs. "I know my value. I know that I'm immortal, a genius, I have great hair, everybody wants to touch my tail... Maybe I'm being naive when I want, just, some connection there, too."

"You're not naive, Jade." It doesn't reassure her, but Jade truly believes Vriska has never been more certain of that for anyone.

"I think you can't say that, just yet. You may know me very well, because of everything we've mutually suffered through over the years, but you'll have to hear about a lot more of the little processes that make me who I am to truly judge." Jade takes Vriska by the shoulder, and they turn around together as Jade points out into the darkness. "We'd have to travel ten-point-three minutes in precisely that direction to hit where Ceres will be on its next trip 'round the asteroid belt, but for now it's halfway around the sun, and I don't want to wait the 840ish days to meet it at its closest point." Floating around Vriska at an arm's length, Jade looks her in the eyes, and shakes her head. "I haven't even come this far from Earth in forever. Space is a wonderful place to just spend some time, meditate on the perfect solitude of it all. But every time, I just think... that I can never know what the point of all this is."

"The point of the... solar system?"

"No, I mean..." Jade bites her cheek, wincing. "Today, I felt like I was shut into myself by decisions I made, and I watched that 'me' do the final little appeasing touches and everything that 'needed' to be done, but I..." her voice catches in her throat. "I wasn't in control. And it felt like I was her, again." Red creeps into Jade's eyes, and she blinks.

Vriska knows exactly who she means. That other Jade, fangs permanently bared, black werewolf-fur and green sparks crackling on every inch of her bloodsoaked flesh. The Thief of Light reaches for Jade's hands, slowly, but the spacebound woman pulls them back.

"So what I mean is, I don't see what difference it makes to be able to do all this, rearranging planets and moons, moving dirt and rocks around, whatever scale it's on. Or... the powers, the strength, the god-tier jammies, what's the point of any of it?" Her eyes well with tears again. "What's the fucking point of being a God Tier, or somebody's Ultimate... Whatever," Jade barks, arms strained and teeth gritted, "if people can still just do that to you, mark you and own you and control you and stuff you away?" Her cheeks are red, now, and she quakes, trying to wick away tears with her unsleeved wrist.

_This_ , Vriska thinks, _is what she's been thinking about for the past few hours, isn't it._ She sits in the quiet, letting the stars texture the backdrop as she embraces Jade again, stroking her hair and letting her sob into the sweatshirt's chest, knowing that she herself was once exactly the problem, all those years ago.

Slowly, Jade unfolds her arms, wrapping them tightly around Vriska's torso, still trembling. "Why would I need all this power, if I know they’re still just going to leave me? If they just die, with no meaning behind it, one after another? If sometimes, when I close my eyes, I know it's me that did it to them?" But the troll gently shushes her, with slow pats along her back.

"It wasn't you. I know it wasn't you. It's okay. That wasn't you, and you didn't do it, because remember. That Jade doesn't control you, she isn't the thing that makes you do what you do."

"But I still rem- rem--"

"Just like Terezi told me, there's no monster that's leapt the divide into your head. You're lucky enough to know that those memories are themselves the thing that you need to defeat. But you can't stew in them, let them rule your life. Jade, you're right that this place is fucking gorgeous, but it makes you very alone." Jade can't speak through the gasps and tears, so Vriska just holds her tightly, measured voice continuing as clearly as she can into a headflattened dog-ear. "You need people around you, Jade Harley, and if being this far away from them causes you to deep-dive into your most painful memories then you need to find a way to salvage this experience before it buries you. Elsewise you were right to not come here for this long."

Jade's crying slows, and eventually morphs into a slow laughter, nose still buried in Vriska's breast. "For you, of all people, to say that," she says with a sniffle, "you adorable hedgehog, all quills and complaining and bluster."

"Eh, it's what I got. I'm not lying, though, you know I'm right."

"Yyyyeah. You're not wrong!" Jade seizes Vriska's wrist, wiping the last of her tears into an unsullied part of the sleeve. "I'm sorry, this was probably a terrible first... second, third? date. I really really appreciate you being willing to do this for me."

But Vriska takes both of Jade's hands in her own, looks deep into her bright eyes, and smiles.

"Y'know, I half expected you to ditch me out here, given the shit I've pulled on you just this morning. If I make it back to Earth it'll be the best date I've ever had, so it's certainly not a thing I did just 'for you'." She seals that affirmation with a kiss. Jade laughs, and twirls Vriska around again, before wrapping her arms around the troll's torso and bursting off towards home again.

_You are Jade Harley_ , the space-goddess thinks. _You are star-stuff. You are the forge and the metalwork, you are the die and the casting that results._

Her hair billows in a wild arc behind her, and she wills her mind to align like a syzygy of celestial forces. She shuts her eyes and watches them move, _planets in a perfect line, bodies in eclipse._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pop quiz! How fast, as a decimal expression relative to C, were the girls traveling in this chapter? Using the Lorentz factor (γ) calculated in the previous problem, and supposing you lack Jade's ability to negate Lorentz factor influences on special relativity, calculate the relative size of Mars in Vriska's frame of reference while moving (given the diameter of Mars from a resting frame of reference, 6794 km). (Hint! You don't need a value for C to calculate this, nor do you need the distance between Earth and Mars! Make sure to account for Jade's rounding in your answer.)
> 
> Fun fact: The amount of energy Jade harnesses to accelerate both their bodies would be greater than the energy expended in the Chicxulub impact event by a factor of about 20. Physics!


	10. XVIII. THE MOON, Reversed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "My bride will devour me: all wives are, so far, spiders!" -C.S. Lewis

Jade draws three cards from her childhood tarot deck, leaves them face-down in a line. She never put much stock into the supposed predictive power of them-- she had her own methods before the game, after all, and is a scientist at heart-- but her newfound flirtation with luck has lent the concept a peculiar allure as of late. She flips the first, and picks up her phone.

* * *

"It was a lot of fun!!! We had a good date!!!" Jade racks the bolt on her hunting rifle, peering down the scope again, but grunts with exasperation, letting the barrel clunk down to the wooden range in front of her. Roxy crosses his arms and gives her a truly inscrutable look.

"im supes happy 4 u! And it sounds like there was hells of TONS of emotional franknesses goin down but im a little, like... confused?"

Jade's ear flicks as she tries once more to line up her gun. "Oh? What about?"

The morning after her adventure with Vriska, Jade had asked Roxy if he wanted to go to a shooting range together. Roxy's first words, 'fuck it, hell ye', were the first Jade had heard from him since the truly raucus party celebrating his and his partner's coming out some months prior.

"first, bc we havent talked since the party an now youve got me here and this is great, im supes happy were hangin out, but second you dont SOUND happy about all this? :?"

Jade hears an edge to his voice she can't account for, and glances at him. Half of Roxy's mouth and one eyebrow contort into a quizzical expression. Raising her own eyebrows, Jade blinks. "Oh, I'm sorry! Is this-- was this weird? Should I have... not done this?"

Roxy waves his hands, batting away her misconception and laughing. "noooooo~! noo no no. no! this is super fun an im glad you asked me out here todayyy." He fixes an errant curl over his forehead, correcting himself. "to shoot that is. i just wasnt sure why it was me you decided to call."

"Okay, good!!" Lining up her rifle, Jade barely takes a moment to square her aim before firing. The shot sounds, and she squints to check her mark: the paper target, printed with the smug image of Aranea Serket in full Marquise uniform, has taken a hole right through the base of one candy-corn horn. Zero points. "I just wanted to find somebody to come shooting with, and I didn't wanna embarass Jake again like last time."

A laugh rises up behind her. "And is that the only reason?"

"Well... I wanted another opinion on that date I went on, okay. She handled it really well, but I wish..." she sighs, setting her weapon down.

"you wish you knew WHY ur havin trubs rite??" Roxy picks up his own rifle. The battery on it beeps a mellifluous 'full power' tune at his touch, and he raises the spearheaded gun to his shoulder, popping off three quick shots. The heat radiates off of each, blooming far enough for Jade to feel it on her cheeks in the next stall over. _Paf, paf, paf_ \-- his own target, a crude crayon caricature of the Condesce in some state of perverse undress, shows three sizzling scorchmarks, two to the upper torso and one to the perfectly-manicured fingers held up at her head.

He wouldn't've picked it-- he's past that phase of his life, being mad at her and her bullshit-- but it's apparently their most popular target here, at least according to the axolotl at the desk. Can't argue with the people.

Jade shrugs. "Sure I do. But it's more like... I hope I'm dating her for the right reasons?" Roxy motions for her to take her turn firing, so she fiddles with the sights on her gun. Her teeth rake her tongue as she squeezes an eye shut, then raises the scope to it. "Like... I know I'm happiest when I get to help people! But I also see why people might call it too pushy, or trying to 'fix' them or something!"

"is that what she said? bc, like i get that feeling.... i HATE changing myself even when i kno its in a good way an all, bc its a slog n a chore. but also when somebody else tries to do it ur like SIGN okay moooooooomm whatevrrrrrrr." He gives a theatrical SIGN as Jade shoots, bullet cleaving Aranea's neck just above the head markerline. With a fistpump and hoot, she flips the magrelease, dropping the spent magazine into her hand and deftly changing it for a new five-round cartridge. She slaps the rifle down and shoots Roxy a look.

"She did say that, yeah."

"owwch."

"I probably deserved it! Even if it made me suuuuuper sad." She frowns, and Roxy shrugs with sympathy. He picks up his gun again, and points a finger downrange.

"watch dis." Roxy tosses the gun straight up, catching it as it flips and turns, before tensing his shoulder to its butt, arcing a perfectly on-mark 'bullet' of blue lightning to streak directly toward Condy's nose. But it bucks a wild turn at the last instant, lashing up to lick at a ceiling beam with a belch of smoke, peal of woody thunder, and the distinct stench of ozone mixed with burning mahogany.  
Only the Consorts would build a firing range out of wood!

Jade and Roxy, two literal deities, have just been ejected for horseplay at a firing range. They meander down the street-- he, sullen, hands in his pockets; she, still laughing, floating, letting her skirt billow and whistling a cryptic tune-- and Roxy turns to his canine compadre. "ur a total goof, but im one thousand percent clear where ur comin from, bc ur bein super adorbs abt all this, an her, even tho she said somethin that made you sad. im not gonna ask you to enumerate everythin that sets ur jorts aflutter-- bc i get that, and ik that feeling that you shouldnt hafta splain yourself for it-- but its supes clear to me that you GET her and youre doin the thing you need."

Jade nods along, unsure of what she's being led into.

"so i just gotta know... you said it makes you happy to help ppl, but... does SHE make u happy, too?"

"Yeah. She does, even in those little moments where I'm too caught up to focus my eyes on her, or she's done something totally illogical, I still just think about her ridiculously sunny smile, the way she keeps stealing my shit without asking, the t... her lips, yeah."

"mmhm, mmhm, MMHM!" Roxy smiles with evermore emphatic 'mm-hm's, watching Jade do little circles around him as she details the magnetic cutenesses in her relationship. "i get all that i do. i mean heck, i also see her position, cuz like? ive been dating a space player for, omg, 3 YRS now and wowww that shits the tits. not that im tryna say... actually yknow what." Bumping his shades up his nose, Roxy takes a moment to heft himself out of the romantic-rhetorical hole he's dug with his good intentions. "lemme try again. ur witch o space, rite?? thats like ur job title?"

"Yeah!"

"so that means that, liek, unlike me u deal with real spaces, planets n holes n big shit like that??"

"I guess so? I always thought Void and Space sounded pretty similar!! But void is like, information, right? Concepts and ideas, not gaps and movement?"

"'zactly! so if i wanna get all, like, roguey about shit, i can scoop somebody's hoopla and confuse the shizz out of em, or help by stealin their misinformation or whatever..."

"Whereas you think I should be able to..." Green eyes narrow as dog ears flick.

Roxy mimes pressing his hands together, like an infant with wet clay. "lemme spit sum shit that just might not... make sense, but i think i can make this metaphor work roxystyle, k. it sounds like a bunch of ur unhappiness is that SPACE SHIT is gettin in yr way, forcing you into lil boxes for people who need to smoosh you into their lives to fit, not givin you the SPACE you need to expand into even tho you deserve to." He wonks, and Jade's head tilts. "so let ur witchy majjyks loose, fix dat shit, fill in those gaps w ur own best self. jus like, shit, whats a spacey thing that expands to fill shit forever. entropy? the heat death of the universe?? no thas not the fuckin mood :\"

Floating by upside-down, Jade holds her chin, just trying to process on what level of metaphor or irony Roxy intends this.

"But... not like a void way, because that's about filling in my... ideas? and you mean like a..."

"like, shit, dawg. we both work with pumpkins, right? but mine r, like, abstractions, and yours are earthy, tasty, make good cheesecakes or sumn. shit im hungry," he mumbles, in that unmistakably Davelike way. Jade giggles.

"So the same stuff, but, like... more real??"

"not more real! just more touchable. an more useable by other peeps."

"Trust me, I have a lot of things in my life that I wish were more touchable right now..." Jade's tongue pokes out between two pointed canines. The cool flit of the breeze through Axolotl town brushes against it.

"be the change u wanna seee!!!!" Feet stamping, Roxy does a little twirl as Jade lands again, giggle progressing now into a full laugh. "but srsly, space is bullshit. callie's told me abt the kinds of things u 2 heard from that other version of em back during nappytimes nobiteyjade, an how u were sposed to just hang out 4ever and wait for everything else to happen around u?? which sounds like EL ULTIMO bullshit to me but whatevs. anyway dont let it crush you like a blaaaapck hooooole." He drags out both words, and Jade wonders if he only even adds the 'p' anymore because it's what people expect him to do. Either way! She nods, completely baffled.

"anyway, u gotta rember callie's all about that space shit too, so i think i know at least a LIL bit when it comes to figurin out the differences between em. thing is, their class is basically the most waitin-aroundin thing there is!! and you need to just get on your fuckin game and ride dat spider into the sunsettttt." Jade blushes, hands covering her face as if to block the radiating heat, but Roxy's laughing too and they both can barely keep it together so when Jade takes off from the ground Roxy flies after her. "i kno this is my bias-- vriskas a thief, im a rogue. vriskas a light type pokeman, im voidy, meanin info vs disinfo kinda stuff. and thats cool! you got yr prefs; im a cat person, ur a dog-person." Jade rarfs in agreement. "so im sure a lot of this is just me having, like, the EXACT opposite inclinations as her, if her powers are more abt bein supes lucky and winnin and stuff all for her own dickwettin purposes. but it also sounds like shes the kinda person who could just SLURRRP u thru a straw and like fuck u up? like wasnt she the spiderbitch that fuckin slept u???"

But Jade stretches her arms wide, soaring through the midafternoon currents with her back to the earth, destination nowhere-in-particular. "Old news. I don't think there's much risk of that, to be honest. Aside from the usual giving-your-heart-over kinds of stuff. She's actually helping me see a lot of ways that I can stop giving up too much of myself, and some of her first advice when I was freaking out and throwing my pumpkins off a roof was to settle down and let other people handle their own problems every once in a while."

"throwin ur... girl okay, but..."

"I'm bad at it! Truly terrible. I still NEED to help, it makes me who I am. But she might be right, I might be letting myself get fragmented among too many people's needs, and I need to refocus on where I let out that energy! Maybe it just turns out to be her!!"

Roxy mimics her flight-gesture, facing down instead of up, and he spreads his fingers wide, gazing down on the fallow fields and dipping hills in the outskirts of the Consort city. "im on the fuck board w that tbh."

"THANK you for your support, Roxy."

"im a good fuckin friend what can i say :D :D" He closes his eyes, letting the open sky above him whistle its song through his ears.

"You can talk about yourself, for a start. I feel like this conversation's been all about me!!"

Roxy laughs, and Jade echoes it quietly. But he nods. "haha alrite thats p true tbh. alrite u know how rolal be. its mostly p quiet? i feel like i dont see dirk and jake much, cuz theyre both doin their own thing, and theres all this stuff w jane..." Roxy's pace slows, and Jade watches him gaze to the horizon, breathing through his nose. His bared arms wrap across his tanktop-clad torso.

"Jane... stuff? Sorry, I haven't really been keeping up with... all that."

"Pshaww pupperfrand its nbd." His visage, however, seems to indicate that Jane's issues could not be, in fact, a b'er d. "im worried about her, yknow? janey.... kinda hasnt called for the last few weeks, ever since she got that court ordered class on how to not be an authoritarian dicksneeze :/"

"Ohhh? Is that what happened with her???" Jade slows to match his speed, arms crossing likewise, suddenly feeling the wind rasping against her entire body.

"Yeahhh."

"But... what kind of class?? What the heck IS that??"

"its like... anger management i guess?? but for the destructive tendencies of people who own mid-to-fuckin-huge corporations :///"

"Oh noooo! Poor Jaaaane..."

"she deserved it tbh. i would kno bc i was the one who put her there."

"Like... how so, put her there?"

"ok like i called her 'corporate board' or whoever to be like 'hey ya gurl got drunk at my place again and started complainin about the Trolls on this planet 'not knowin their places' and we not about that life here so put her in the drunk tank before her bffsy goes public on her ass again."

Jade's tail twinges, and she spins through the air. She suddenly feels dizzy, so she tries to fix her gaze on whatever stable point in the distance she can. It's funny, the further out from the city things get, the easier it is to miss each dotted house along the landscape for thickening treelines and snaking byways.

"That sounds... really fraught."

"yea i kno"

"It's okay. I wanna hear about it, y'know? I care about what happens to all of us, even if she and I never... really met, at least for more than the occasional barbeque or groundbreaking." Roxy takes a while to respond, and when he does Jade hears in his voice a certain reticence.

"yea. its probs good you an she never met tbh, cept in the dream hoedown w callie..."

"And in the other timeline. Go ahead, it's true."

"naw jade naw. im not gona do that to you-- i was there, i saw it, it wasnt you and i wont lay that at ur feet. so dont step into those ruby slippies bc they'll only smush you into their shape again. more space shit, rite?"

"...Yeah. More space shit, right." Jade knows, of course, that if anybody has the right to feel that rage it would be Roxy, but she watches him rolls loosely into the wind, clearly trailing another thread of thought.

"anyway-- listen we have been having HELLS of an amazing time here on this bitch of an earth sea. see its sea bc its EARTH C but also bc its not a sea like--" he spreads his hands far in front of him, towards the encroaching glitter and tidal roar of the calm oceanside, and Jade blinks. "well anyway my point is that im not braggin like those couples on nookbook who r like 'OMG WE R MARRIED FORECER WE R THE BEST'-- forevar*-- but callie an i?? gangbusters!! so the idea that callie has to like give up happiness and relationships n shit just because their aspect is about the negative space AROUDN paradox space's main jam? its BULLSHIT."

Rubbing her arms together, Jade just listens, soaks it in. For all the Strider-Lalonde rambling, it does sound exactly like what Davepetasprite was trying to tell her before she woke up.

"an we know lots of things about where these 'cosmic info sources' got everythin wrong! im p sure that callie believed their class was like GIRL DESTINED forever because of similar bs fed to all of us by this games narrative. well guess what!! the idea that the universe needs to be ABOUT procreation is the reason that these fuckn cliches exist in the first place, that there are like super gendered classes and group compositions are like 'gender balanced' or whatev, but i think we all p much decided that was bullshit like a DECADE ago." Roxy nods a fervent nod, gazing to Jade through his coolkid shades.

Jade nods, nods again, but has to say it.

"...What?"

"u go enjoy u some vriska serket. you deserve a prime cut of that choice spidery ass tbh. let dat thief of light..." he splays and ripples his fingers like the grand marshal of a glitter-spewing parade float. "steal ur breath awayyyy."

With that, his trajectory peels off, looping back towards his tower home in the Carapace kingdom with his delightful partner. Jade sails on over the water, ducking low to the sea to watch the blazing wake carved in her path, cresting and spraying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In the reversed position, this card represents the peeling away of one’s obfuscations and deceptions, particularly those that are internal. It warns that the cardholder for The Moon may be holding themselves back in fear of truth, change or the harshness of reality." -The Homestuck Tarot: Acts 6 & 7


	11. Knight of Pentacles, Queen of Swords

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sure, sex is great! But have you ever gotten Vriska Serket to to feel trusting and safe to the point where she's willing to just lounge on your couch and talk about her life? Have you ever FELT Jade Harley's ears?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Knight of Pentacles: "An extremely hard worker; one dedicated to the accomplishment of their tasks, often ambitious and career-oriented." -Homestuck Tarot: Acts 6 & 7.  
> Queen of Swords: "A powerful and tactical ruler, sometimes cruel; confidence; independence; loneliness and emotional detachment." -Homestuck Tarot: Acts 6 & 7.
> 
> NEWLY POSTED! There's now a [PESTERLOG VERSION](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20013541/) of the entirety of Solstice of Abundance, including THIS CHAPTER, as a parallel work! Go check it out, enjoy the Homestuck-style format, and read the extended endnotes to each chapter!

JADE: heyyy!  
JADE: is vriska there??  
TEREZI: WHO W4NTS TO KNOW  
JADE: hey is OUR girlfriend there :p  
TEREZI: Y34H >:]  
JADE: :D awesome!  
JADE: i respect your time and relationship space and stuff  
JADE: and i hate to bug the two of you while youre getting alone time together...  
TEREZI: WH4T C4N 1 H3LP YOU W1TH H4RL3Y  
TEREZI: SH3S 4 L1TTL3 BUSY 4T TH3 MOM3NT >;]  
JADE: :o :o  
JADE: well she doesnt have a phone yet!  
JADE: so just tell her to.....  
JADE: i dunno drop by some time soon!  
TEREZI: WOULD YOU L1K3 M3 TO BURROWST1NKB34ST HER TO F1N4LLY R3PL4C3 H3R DEV1C3 >:o  
JADE: burrowstinkbeast??  
TEREZI: YOUR 34RTH B4DG3R  
JADE: its YOUR earth badger now too :p  
TEREZI: >:/  
TEREZI: F1N3 WOULD YOU L1K3 M3 TO OUR 34RTH B4DG3R H3R TO T3XT YOU  
JADE: yes! if you can get her to  
JADE: it is impossible for me to even get a hold of her!!  
TEREZI: 1 KNOW HOW YOU F33L  
JADE: :/  
TEREZI: 1LL DO 1T 1N TH3 MORN1NG SUR3

* * *

VRISKA: Jaaaaaaaade!  
VRISKA: Heh, J8.  
JADE: hiiii! :D  
VRISKA: Heyyyyyyyy. Morning!  
JADE: whatre you up to?  
VRISKA: Well, see, I woke up to this 8lind girl shoving a phone in my face and telling me to text you. So I take the spit-covered palmhusk and your num8er's already in it. So maaaaaaaay8e her 8adgering worked!  
VRISKA: And, you said to text 8efore I came over the next time........  
JADE: youre right i did say that :o  
VRISKA: Soooooooo I'm coming over. I need some goddamned 8reakfast, 8ut if you needed a 8ite I'm sure I could arrange something for the 8oth of us ::::)  
JADE: a bite you say? when you say it that way it sounds like something else ;D  
VRISKA: :::;)  
JADE: yeah if you wanna make food here come on over!!  
JADE: i dont actually mind if people just show up  
JADE: especially to cook for me :p  
VRISKA: Special Serket Cluck8east Surprise coming up, then! I assure you, you won't 8e disappointed.

JADE: hehe burrowstinkbeasting  
VRISKA: Oh g8d, did she tell you that was the troll word for 8adgers?  
JADE: its not???  
VRISKA: Hahahaha.  
VRISKA: Oh, Harley.  
JADE: WELL IF IT ISNT IT SHOULD BE >:B

"I know last time you said you didn't expect me to be able to cook, but I do make a mean omelette!"  
Vriska is recumbent on the couch looking like nothing so much as a well-fed panther; she stretches one arm upward as the other reaches for her coffee. It is just before 8 am, and she has just cooked a lovely meal for their date: a pair of fluffy three-egg omelettes, chock-full of grain-fed fennel sausage, vine-ripened tomato, and that delightful extra-extra-sharp cheddar cheese from the grandfatherly troll dairy farmer down the road. Jade also whipped up a delightful habanero-tomatillo salsa alongside it. Jade returns and plants herself on the far corner of the couch, torso adorned with only a silver necklace and beige bra.

Vriska herself has only her glasses to keep her upper half warm, that and the dappled sunlight, streaming through the garden-facing windows. She insisted that both of them remove their clothes for fear of slathering their garments-- Jade's proper white button-down, her own grubby orange tee-- with salsa or flecks of tomato. She crawls towards Jade, wearing the sort of smug expression that displays her every fang, and delivers the first kiss of the morning.

Jade sighs with satisfaction as she pulls Vriska into her lap. Their stomachs brush together, skin on bare skin, and Vriska attempts to keep her squeakbeast's nest of hair from toppling in front of her eyes.

 _This is what you get_ , Jade supposes, _when two people with some 8 feet of hair between them try to make out on too small of a couch_. She takes the opportunity to brush her own mane off of her forehead.

When Vriska had given her that sly grin and suggested they both denude themselves, Jade had assented with a giggle and unbuttoned her blouse. Jade wonders if this is how she gets her sweatshirt back: Vriska discarding it under the coffee table or over the arm of the loveseat during an early rendezvous. Her eyes dart down. _Nope, she wore a different outfit today, damn_.

And now, she has a Vriska atop her, and she smiles.

Vriska rolls her fingers around Jade's wrist, and idly shifts their entangled hands against the cushions. Jade shoots her a sultry look. "Ooh, so now you've got me mostly naked, and you're pinning me to the couch, hmm??"

"So what if I am?"

Both girls laugh. Their lips meet again, lingering this time, and Jade can smell-- just past the habanero still on her breath-- the distinct plaster-powder scent of dogwood tree in her hair, but beneath even that the barest whiff of Terezi's shampoo. Jade brings her hands up, urging Vriska to lay flat atop her as she shifts to a more comfortable position. "I hope it's not too weird to see Terezi and I both in the same contexts like this? I know it's only been a few days since we even brought up the concept of poly."

Vriska's brow folds with concern, and she ponders for a moment, tongue flicking her upper lip. "Y'know, I thought adjusting might take me a little more work, but no! I'm glad I'm not having to limit myself or choose between you two. I was prepared for draaaaaaaama, like some trashy redrom novel! But imagine holding Vriska Serket back from everyone who needs a piece of her."

"Even though..." Jade bobbles her head, suddenly gauging the wisdom of sharing some information.

"Though what? Spit it out, Harley."

"Did Terezi not tell you? She and I kinda hooked up, a while back. Y'know, years ago, and only like twice."

Vriska's chin tilts upward, eyes traveling to the dome-light in the ceiling. "A word of unsolicited advice? Don't talk about your exes while we're kissing on your couch."

Jade blushes. "Oh, I wasn't thinking about that!! Heh, sorry!" But Vriska nudges her with an affectionate elbow.

"Don't worry about it. I'm glad to know, I am! She hadn't mentioned it, probably because it wasn't relevant, and most of our time's been spent..." She rubs her wrists together, making a noise with her mouth like two rubber gloves making frictive contact.

Jade's lips purse, and she wrinkles her nose. Vriska ducks down and smooches it.

"Glad to hear it's going well," Jade says, and nods. "I'm happy to drop it."

"A wise decision." Vriska coils her arms around Jade's shoulders and underneath her neck, maximizing her vantage for further affection.

* * *

Some time later, Jade awakens and sits herself up in bed. She flips her phone over on the bedside: it's 11:15 AM, meaning that she's just woken up from an hourlong postcoital nap. The two women had adjourned to the bedroom shortly after breakfast, and Jade surmises that Vriska is likely still in the house given the skinny jeans draped alongside her own skirt on the back of a chair. As her alien paramour is nowhere to be seen, she considers gathering their garments from downstairs before Vriska returns. But at that moment, she notices the sound of the shower shutting off, and the spidergirl walks back in, haphazardly rubbing at her hair with one of Jade's fluffy bathsheets.

 _This is one of those moments_ , Jade thinks, _that if I were one of those trashy troll novelists, I'd need to rattle off her physical characteristics, and I'd have to come up with some truly celestial superlatives to do it._ _'Her cans caromed cavortingly'_ , she muses. _'Her tits thrusted tremulously.' 'Her pert boobs flit nipplingly, cast in contrast against the dappled midmorning fog through bay windows.'_

Jade has been ditched by enough well-meaning short-term lovers that she's earnestly slightly touched by Vriska's return. And she does, once her inner horndog quits tittering over breasts, watch Vriska cross the space.

A muscle tenses in Vriska's back, precursor to the motion of a limb; arms arch to grip the towel wrapped around her head, and graceful legs pad towards the couch. She gazes to one side, eyes finding Jade's, arms still stretched above her head: whatever she's about to do, she wishes it to be seen.

Black hair unfurls and cascades down bared shoulders not so much like a shampoo commercial as the unsheathing of a bootknife.

Jade thinks back to a particular weekend fling, a woman... named Addy, or Zyra, or something between, whose whole bedroom was a wilderness foray of hacked trails through tinctures, balms, leave-in conditioners, aftercare oils, and heat masks. The smell was enrapturing, but sitting bare-breasted on the young human's floor-mattress, waiting as she dressed herself in layers of unknowable cremes and contours, made Jade feel feral, untrained. _Wasn't her fault. I am merely not built of those parts. Mine is a different machine._

Jade cannot help but wonder if Vriska has ever used a leave-in conditioner in her life, or worried about how to combat flyaway hairs or whether her hotrollers were adequately heated. _No, she doesn't seem the type._ Jade squeezes her eyes shut to take in the air, nose filling with a waft of gentle pine soap and her favorite grapefruit-vanilla shampoo, both exuded from the newly-clean woman in her bedroom.

And it's all Jade can do to not walk over and bury an undignified snout right in Vriska's wet scalp, to drink in the scents of her body. _Although..._

Just as Vriska seats herself-- becomes comfortable, discards the towel-- Jade stands, taking her own _en pointe_ steps right behind the couch, and aligns herself above Vriska.

_What's life without a little indulgence? Too short for 'dignity', anyway. Kanaya and Roxy'd be proud._

Elbows resting against the couch back, Jade slithers her arms down Vriska's sides, a hand planting firmly at either hip. Vriska turns her cheek upward, clearly expecting a kiss, but as Jade's sniffer plonks down on the back of her head-- almost avoiding running into the horns-- she nuzzles up against the proffered head regardless.

"Your skin is... so soft," Jade mumbles. From this vantage she can hear Vriska's steady, adagio heartbeat, feel every rib in her side; her own hands follow the motions of a body tensing and rippling as she laughs silently.

The spider-troll sinks back against the couch.

"A month ago I would've killed anybody who said that to me."

"We both know that's not true. But were you even close enough to anyone for them to get the chance?"

"Of course not. Wasn't in the mood." She draws out the vowel, one arm meeting Jade's to squeeze it in against the curve of her stomach.

Jade sweeps the mass of hair away from Vriska's neck, and puts her lips to it.  
"I'll take that as a compliment, then!"

Vriska feels the electric scrape of gentle canines against her skin. She lets loose a long sigh, head lolling to one side as her mouth falls agape.

Her eyes brush open again, and she realizes she's pitching to one side as her head keels too emphatically.

Jade keeps her upright, and breaks away, laughing. "C'mon," Jade says, planting her arms on the back of the couch and vaulting it to sit beside Vriska. "Ask me a question. Any weird human shit you've never been able to interrogate in somebody, orrrr, something about my life."

Vriska makes room for her, shuffles herself over so that both of their bodies can align and face each other. Her eyes trail down the doggirl, whose tail hangs brushlike from the front of the seat, her legs crossed. She had never expected that the human sternum could be so eye-catching, lacking the chitinous plates and reinforced endoskeletal matrices she was accustomed to. She ponders how pubic and leg hair, while concepts foreign to troll bodies, strike her as almost decadent, but she appreciates the joyful ways in which humans express themselves through their cultivation or removal. Jade, she notes with affection, is a cultivator of many things, it seems. And Jade, unlike other humans she had encountered naked, seems to keep her whole bearing warm and open, never shying away from the elegant act of being seen. _She's most herself when she's wearing no clothing, isn't she._

"Alright," Vriska says, smirking. "Fine! Uhhh." She plants a hand to her chin. "Before you saw any trolls naked, how many nipples did you expect us to have?"

"Oh! I figured you'd have different numbers for each of your, like, tiers? The more fancy the troll, the fewer nipples, so, like... eight at the low end, zero at the top." Jade shrugs, foot swaying.

"What a spectacular guess!" Vriska says with a shrug in kind. "I mean, the reality is that NONE of us have any-- because we don't have uses for them like you monkeys do-- but still."

"And how many did you expect from us?"

"Well, none, of course! Feeding babies off your body, leaving you vulnerable. Silliest thing I've ever heard."

"...And did that differ for me, because of the..."

"Dog stuff? Yeah, I expected ten, like your Lusus had."

"So..." Jade looks down with amusement, cupping one of her breasts. "Two was a surprise either way, huh?"

Vriska tries not to stare, and focuses on relaxing her body, emulating Jade's posture. If she's honest, her perception of the young woman in front of her-- naive, flighty, uncritical-- couldn't have been proven more wrong in two weeks time. She wonders who else still believes that Jade is nothing but bubbly, an excitable and girlish dork? But she dispels the thought from her mind, and allows herself instead to gaze at the tremendous green eyes watching for her response.

"Yep! Welcome one, though. Guess I wouldn't know how to manage ten, I'd be overwhelmed! Out of my depth. Here, I've got another question for ya: how do you feel about barkbeast puns?"

"People always assume I won't like dog puns! I have no idea why!" Jade's tail thumps against the couchback as she tosses up her hands, and she chuckles. She extends a leg to rest alongside Vriska's. "I don't mind them at all!"

"Are you sure?"

A sly grin and narrowed eyes. "Try me."

"If I tell you to 'go fetch'?"

"I'll tell you to get it yourself, but that's because I'm not _your_ dog."

"Do you shed on the carpets?"

"More than you'd think, but that's mostly head-hair."

"Are you a good dog?"

"More than you'll ever fuckin' know."

"How do you feel about the human phrase 'the dog's bollocks'?"

Jade blushes at that one, blinks. "I'm sorry?"

"It's... I heard Jake say it once, when he was drunk at a party. Apparently it's... Brit, ish? I think it means 'good', who knows."

"Oh. Huh." She casts her eyes downward again. "Na'ah, doesn't bother me, I guess."

"Sorry if I'm barkin' up the wrong tree!"

Jade laughs.

"Next question:" Vriska shifts, sliding Jade's leg onto her lap, and inches closer to the reclining canine. Her hand runs up the length of it, feeling warm calf, knee, and thigh under her palm. "Why'd you say you wanted to meet Terezi a few days ago, if you and she already knocked nooks?"

"Oh! Yeah, that makes sense." Jade's face brightens, and she sits up a bit. "I mean, she and I didn't talk much, much like it sounds like you and she haven't. Plus, meeting a meta's kinda different from... shagging." She puts a hand on Vriska's back, making gentle circles with the heel of it. Vriska leans a little closer, shoulder almost touching shoulder now.

"Fair enough! What's the funniest thing you ever did with Karkat?"

"Wellll," Jade says, finger tapping her chin, "given that we only dated for a few weeks, there's not much to pull from. Oh! I tied him up with guitar cables."

"Aren't those... breakable?"

"He insisted I use what was around!" Jade swings her arms for emphasis, and scoots in on the couch, butt side to side with Vriska's. "Turns out he is NOT okay with being tickled while he's tied up, though."

Vriska's eyes are the size of whole watermelons. "VANTAS isn't into tickling????????"

"Noooope!"

"Shit," she says, crossing her arms poutingly. "I owe Kanaya some money!"

Jade wraps an arm around her in mock sympathy. "Here, I've got one for you."

"Is it about the glasses?? Because no, I don't NEED them, I just think they're cute."

"Wait, you don't!? Oh! I, uh, yeah, I guess I had wondered, but with God Tier stuff you never know. I still need mine, weirdly. June needs hers, and..."

"I asked somebody about this once, actually. She said that it has to do with how your 'truest self' imagines itself-- herself."

"Well, they ARE cute! But you still... choose to wear yours, even if you don't need them due to what your 'truest self' sees at their core?" Jade marvels for a second, blinking. "God, my head hurts. I can't do brains."

Vriska shrugs.

"Anyway," Jade continues, squeezing Vriska's shoulder, "why did Terezi maim you like that?"

"Didn't I say, last time? It's kind of a troll thing. Traditional, if you will."

"Hey, I answered all your questions honestly! I didn't push you that night, but I hope you respect me enough to give me a straight answer now." Jade pulls off her glasses, giving Vriska a look, and sets them on the arm of the couch. Vriska just watches her face, for a moment, drinking in the image, before offering a hand at her lap. Jade lays her free hand in it, twining fingers amongst gray fingers.

"Beats me. I sincerely don't know! I show up again after three years, in a freakin' coma, and she ATTACKS me. Unsurprising, yes, and got my attention! But I'm pretty sure I would have gotten the point if she'd sent flowers."

"...huh."

Vriska loops an arm over Jade's, hand coming to rest between her ears and gently twirling a lock of hair around a finger. But she stops short of...

"Go ahead! You can touch em, don't be shy."

And Vriska does, rubbing up and down the whole length of Jade's divinely fluffy ears. Even though the two of them have been naked together under the same roof for the past three hours straight, this still strikes the blueblooded troll as obscenely intimate, almost profane. She speeds her fingertips along them, digging into white fur.

Slumping into Vriska's lap, Jade sigh-grunts, the muscles in her upper arms taut and nose scrunched. Her leg, canted into the air, flexes, and her heel thumps hard into the front of the plush sofa with quick rhythm.

Vriska just can't help herself. "Good dog, best lay." She imagines Jade will be annoyed, but the bemused expression on her face-- mixed with her unbroken ecstasy at earscritches-- says otherwise. Her tail wags with a quick _thwip-thwip-thwip_ against the corduroy, she cocks her head back… and barks, twice in quick succession? Her grin says that Vriska should treat that as though it’s normal, not weird, and certainly not the sort of unguarded quirk that makes a pump biscuit explode with otherworldly delight. So yellow fingernails scruff behind both ears, drawing trails in fur with quick, small motions, and Harley bonks her head back into Vriska's stomach playfully.

When the troll finally relents, Jade shivers for an instant, arms coming to rest under her head as she drapes across Vriska's legs. Her eyes pop open, and she blinks, but lets them droop closed once more. Dexterous hands brush along the prone goddess' back, planting themselves at her shoulder and her side, and she sighs with the contentment of a woman for whom the springs in her clockwork can finally uncoil at the hands of an expert.

"Mnrrrrr..." Jade helpfully groans, and raises a finger on one hand. "Yes, that exactly." Vriska puts a hand to Jade's ribs, scooching her up for maximum body contact, and Jade slides in with relish. "Okay, Vriska. Next question's f'r you: why were you not surprised by my genitals first time y'saw'em?"

"Because, it's like with nipples! The idea that humans had 'different sexes' kinda baffled me. First time I saw a human naked, I had to go look up what other ones even looked like."

Jade nods lazily, eyes closed and chin planted against Vriska's hip. "Makes sense."

"Jade Harley, are you a large-argentscoop or small-argentscoop kinda snuggler?"

"Big spoon. Gotta get my huggin' on."

"Well, shit. Me too."

"S'good. We'll take turns. We've got time." Jade tenses and releases her shoulders, letting her arms drape in the closest approximation to a hug as she can make to Vriska's bare legs.

Vriska sighs, tosses her hair over the back of the couch, rolls her head back. She lets her eyes flick closed, and takes deep breaths through the nose, out of the mouth. She hears Jade sigh in time with her breathing, and they lay there awhile, merely two bodies held close.

"Jade?"

"Yeah, Vriska?"

"I don't mind people trying to change me. I know Terezi always did it because she knew she could make me a better person, and I know that you would, too."

"Mmkay. I'll still try to make sure we talk about anything that's wrong and we can agree on problems. I don't wanna fix people if they don't wanna change."

"Yeah."

After a while, Jade's breathing moves from measured cycles back to a somnambulant snuffle. Vriska knows precisely what this means: Jade has fallen asleep in her lap, twitching slightly, but ultimately cozy against another warm body. _Maybe I'm just like the rest of them, Vriska thinks. Just another animal snuffling about for companions in the dark, and the comfiest pile of straw in which to rest with them. Maybe that's why all the best people for me are the mind-readers, the ones willing to share with me what I'm doing wrong, how I can get stronger. Well, better, at least. Hm._

* * *

“Mmm… I could really go for some coffee.” Propped up on her arms, Jade bends her back to stretch and shiver. She yawns. Like a goddess on a vase, she casts her wild hair over a shoulder, and look Vriska dead in the eyes.

Vriska smiles a jagged smile. “Ooh, get me some too, thanks. There's a good lap-dog.”

Jade stands, expression halfway between incredulity and bemusement, and shakes her head. But Vriska's smile doesn't abate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean... where else would Terezi have gotten the info to make that 'knotting' joke in the epilogues, right? This story's not canon with 'em, but... c'mon.  
> Also, that grandfatherly troll dairy farmer's name? Ygmund Lorpey. He's the purpleblood equivalent of an octagenarian and he farms Holstein cows with his adored yellow-blooded matesprit Solfej Latido. You're welcome for staving off those sleepless nights.  
>   
> If you would like to read the omitted sex scene from the middle of this chapter, you can do so [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20287273).


	12. The Huntsman and the Hound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All journeys should end, Jade thinks, with this degree of nudity. Skirts are fine, but maybe she just needs to go howl in the woods every once in a while, knowing she's blissfully unheard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When I was 3, my mother said to me  
> Eat up your beans, and say your grace  
> While far away, they put a dog in space  
> and left her there, you shoulda seen her face" -Moxy Fruvous, _Laika_
> 
> If you would like a listening suggestion for this chapter, may I suggest Elephant Gym's _Ocean in the Night_ and _Quilt_?

A few weeks later.

Vriska stirs slowly, rolling in place with intent to slump a denuded arm over the torso of Jade Harley. She's always found it difficult not to crash to sleep immediately after good sex; and she had gotten FUCKED before, but that!...

Her arm lands on the bed just below Jade's pillow, and she opens her eyes to find herself completely alone. The stars twinkle out the window, just above the treeline, and she rubs her eyes and checks her phone for the time. 3:17AM, it chitters back to her. She looks around the darkened room.

Jade is nowhere to be seen, not gazing out the window, not burning the late-night oil on a drawing or the chapter of a book or a late-night Carapacian program on the reproductive lives of molluscs. Her bass guitar, however, is not in its stand, and as Vriska rises from the bed with a yawn and stretch, she sees out the window that the greenhouse lights are on.  
She plucks the green microfiber robe from the back of the door-- she hasn't slept with her clothing on at Jade's since that first night-- and gently pads downstairs.

The night rests heavy against Jade's unmowed lawn, unrelenting humidity weighting down dewless grass like a fishnet of molten lead. The whole grove is pervaded by the drone of cicadas. Vriska steps out into it, toward the lighted building.

Jade, in yesterday's long black skirt and white tank top, is playing the bass for her greenhouse plants. She stands against the far wall from the door, eyes half-closed in melodic meditation. Thumb alternates with two rocking fingers, expertly dancing along taut, metalwound strings. They imbue in each note a flowing sort of weight and beautiful bass resonance that plants, Vriska supposes, must respond well to.

It's not like she would have any idea. She's spent several afternoons, just... sitting in the grass, watching Jade silently work, listening to the little snatches of nothing she hums to herself as she roots out pests and turns up turnips. But for all the time they've spent together-- on forest hikes, on seaside conversations, on rolls in the hay-- perhaps gardening is the one that Vriska understands the least.

But she watches Jade's hands, whose calloused touch she's become rather familiar with. Vriska has gotten a taste of the same caress and attention they give to the neck of the bass-- felt it on her body, watched it work on those turnips or ministrate a batch of biscuits. But for the first time she sees it processed into two delicate, intertwining strands of music, melody and bassline, filling the whole space.

She notes with appreciation the care given to those sleeping in the house, soundproofed as the greenhouse was from the powerful speakers rumbling and rippling away in each corner. Maybe Jade predicted a great many sleepless nights when she built it, and foresaw a time when she wouldn't have to live alone, but would still need a space of her own to simply adjourn to and think.

When they first met, Vriska had presumed that Harley wasn't much of one for thinking. Lamentably she didn't give up the image of the snoozing, oblivious princess from their youth until she had cause to speak to her face to face. Yes, she had accepted the truly abominable scope of her crush, in the moment she committed to rejoining society after three months of indigence on Earth C. But in doing so, her excuse was that she had no interest in the person, merely the cute doggy ears and the cadence of speech she'd heard from afar.

 _Aah, the burial of lies._ First, her little joke about Kanaya sending her like a beleaguered servant; second, the half-truth about her motivation being their 'alternate selves'. _Well, putting them to rest, even to myself, is a burial of a sort..._ The truth was more elegant: _even Vriska Serket is sometimes wrong on her first read._

And she's glad she dispelled those unidimensional notions of Jade, saw her as more than a tireless glade-tender with no moods or needs or drives. She watched as her girlfriend cared for plants, for others, for Vriska herself, and in doing so learned, paradoxically, that Jade wasn't putting off her own real happiness to do so-- and that the multitude underneath still strove to exist, to get out, to tell its stories and share its woes.

_Maybe that's why I look up to her. Maybe she manages to do everything I wish I could towards the others, still be nice, still be likeable, still be happy... Shit, Vriska. Am I really goin' there?_

Vriska Serket once said, purely to herself, that you don’t have to be a good person to be a hero, and she believed that because she had to; without it, she's pretty sure she would’ve gone sour, or worse: soft. But now that she's been the hero-- saved the universe, as far as anyone can tell-- maybe, she thinks, it's not so bad to want to be a good person, to find in herself the magnanimity to forgive the pusillanimous failure of a ghost she once was.

Jade looks up, then, finishes a bar of music, and cuts off halfway through a chorus, evidently feeling it an appropriate end for the odd-tempo, major-key math-aria she had been offhandedly improvising. Her eyes are steady, trained on Vriska's as she slings her bass over a shoulder. "Sorry if I woke you up. I turned off the indoor cross-speakers, but if you could hear it from here, or the lights were too bright..."

Vriska brushes the notion away. "Na'ah. Woke up on my own. Trouble sleeping?"

"Yep."

"Bad dream? Chasin' too many nutbeasts?"

Jade gives her a sidelong look, eyebrows furrowed. "I once dreamt I had five arms, you know. This bass was designed with all these weird, I don't know, dreamlike features, just for me. And once upon a time, I could use them-- the second neck, two keyboards. It's even got a built-in mixer and compressor so that the notion makes any sense at all. My dreambot could play it, my dreamself could understand it. She couldn't string together sentences but even in my sleep I knew every scale and mode, how to piece in a couple chords and stay in key passably well as she handled the separate instruments. But I don't have five arms, anymore." A pause. "I never did myself, I guess. So I make do with the one neck."

Vriska raises a hand, looking at the green beans filling the low planter between the women, just poking up their pale heads from the dirt. "If you... only if you'd like, I can help you sleep. Not unless you want me to."

Jade shakes her head, lips pursed. "I've managed on my own for years since then, so I'll do it myself, thanks. Or at least with your snuggles for company, but no powers."

"Sounds like a deal to me."

She offers an elbow, and Jade loops her arm through, resting the side of her head at Vriska's shoulder as they walk together.

Vriska pauses as they reach the winding stonework path back to Jade's domicile. "If you hadn't taught me a few constellations, I wonder how often I'd look up at the stars. I can't imagine the old me taking time out of her busy days of conquest to try to find shapes in them, but here we are."

Jade stops as well, and turns to the sky. These are not the galaxies and guidestars of her childhood, but as she and a number of fellow rapt enthusiasts rename them-- some even after her favorites from home!-- she has begun to refamiliarize herself with the fresh sky. "Tell me which ones you like best," she says, hands placed to her hips.

Vriska puts an arm around her, careful not to dislodge her guitar. "Well, obviously, I only know so many. But I know the important ones. That's Sirius, right?"

Jade nods, trying not to be smug. "Yep, the dog star. α-Canis Majoris." She kisses Vriska's cheek, her own form of positive reinforcement.

"And next to it, in its constellation-- the confusingly-named Canis Major-- are Adhara," another kiss, "Mirzam," another, "annnnd... NR Canis Majoris." Kiss.

"Annnnnnd the binary star rotating along with Sirius?" Jade gives a doofy, expectant grin, hands now woven behind her back.

"Scorpius Canis Majoris." Vriska rolls her eyes, holding back a laugh. "I'm still annoyed you gave me the smaller one."

"Well, you are shorter! And, hey-- I literally renamed a star in the night sky for you, in a name that'll be held over for as long as the written information of this civilization lives, so I'd take what you can get."

Vriska props up onto her bare tiptoes, and kisses Jade Harley's forehead. "I can't fight with a woman who literally renames the stars themselves after me. What'll you do when we break up, go to the New Prospit Astronomical Society in a huff and tell them that a lover's spat is responsible for your sudden decision to revert the name to your first choice, Serket-Is-A-Buttface Canis Majoris?"

"Well, I think it's more likely we'd rename the whole constellation Scorpio to The Huge Bitch Academy For Fucked Up Shitasses. Memorials to a fuckup cast in suns for all eternity, eh?" Jade giggles, and swings the door open, hand in Vriska's.

"And what does us in, in this little scenario of yours?" Vriska passes through the kitchen, finishing off a glass of water left at the wayside during an earlier meal.

"Maybe your gambling addiction reaches a fevered pitch, despite your foreknowledge of every diceroll and infinite funds." Jade crosses the threshold to the stairs, turning to face her partner and drifting up them, bare feet hovering just off the dark wood.

"Orrrrrrrr, maybe _your_ burgeoning insistence on owning a full pack of those big white fluffy barkbeasts you like so much finally drives me to escape to equatorial climates so you can't follow without overheating."

"Oh, if they took up too much space I'd just shrink 'em down. Think about it!! Quarter-scale samoyeds, like well-proportioned puppies, romping, and playing, and when you need snuggles from a big dog you just--" Jade swings her hands apart and makes a _whoosh_ ing noise with her mouth, grin widening.

"See what I mean? Dangerous thinking! After all, we're already the grub attendants of every other infinite-life mook on this planet. Oh, and Vantas."

Together they reach the bedroom, and Jade flips the lights on. She huffs, puffing her cheeks out. "C'moooon. Give them at least a little credit, it's not like they actually need much saving anymore."

"I knoooooooow." But Vriska crosses her arms, face belying concern.

"What is it?" Jade rubs at her shoulders, grouping Vriska's hair over one hand as she presses her palms against trapezius muscles. 

"Just... last night. I can't help but wonder if that's the problem, a whole world to ourselves, no colossal threat to face up to."

"What was it you said, how we're both in need of people to worry about? A problem to solve?"

“Sort of. Have you heard of… Rose once told me about this human philosophy thing, I wanna say it was called... the Prisoner’s Dilemma?” The robe finds the back of the door once more, and Vriska sits at the edge of the bed, dragging herself up towards previously abandoned pillows. "I think she was trying to psychoanalyze me at the time, so I made it clear that my choice was to eat any hypothetical babies that happened to be in the hypothetical room with me. She got the message. The premise stuck around in my head, though. But every time I tried to use it on my dumbass teammates it fell through."

“The Prisoner's Dilemma? How on earth were you... using it?" Jade, one arm wrapped around a plush crocodile, loops the other around her lover. "It’s a… mathematical abstraction, assholishness reduced to a balance of numbers. One right answer, three wrong answers.”

“Uh-huh. That was exactly what I thought the problem was too, Jade.”

When she hears her name, Jade's shoulders shiver, and she rolls them.

Vriska jabs a pointy nail into her palm. “‘Why would I care,' I hear you say, 'since we could maximize happiness for all of us if anybody would just listen to me'? It's like, 'I can't solve everybody's problems, so it's too close to my fuckin' life'?"

Jade nods to her, expression rapt with mutual understanding.

"But it turns out it’s so much MORE than that! See, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is beautiful despite that fact-- nobody takes the right answer, because _I_ think they're always too scared to see what you'll do, and they hedge their bets, try to stack the deck in their favor. Every single instance of the problem is only a problem BECAUSE it's full to the brim of petty humans of every stripe! With their contradictions, demands, selfish impulses..." She shrugs, clearly on a roll, and rests her back against Jade's now-bare front. "You just have to let yourself look past the petty probabilities and into the true meaning of why somebody would pick the option less likely to give them the best collaborative reward.”

Jade nods again, unable to deny the thought: sometimes she had just wanted to yell and carry on about how if people could just get over some petty feeling they could solve a problem so much quicker. "So when you said that you never felt like you had trouble picking the right path back in your session, even when things didn't work out or your friends got hurt, you meant..."

"That being 'brave' is actually really easy! You just have to do it. And that I always wished they would just listen to me, because even if they had to take some short-term sucky moods we could've plowed through everything so much more effectively."

"Ughhhh. That was the worst!! People are hard, and I don't understand them. How could they not see it??"

"Fuckin' right?"

Both girls laugh. Jade nestles down into the bed proper, one arm wrapped around her stuffed red reptile, the other, Vriska's shoulders. "The, uh, the metaphor I always thought about when they'd get me down, or not act like I thought they should, or not see the patterns behind it all, I thought about the... there's this thing in physics called Young's Double Slit Experiment.” Vriska laughs, and props herself up, but stops when she realizes that Jade isn't about to show her a NubHub video. “It's where, by breaking up light into small enough pieces, you can get it to show you how it's both a particle and a wave at the same time.”

“Alright, interesting physics lesson, but why does this matter at 3 in the morning?”

“Because I always find myself wondering, whenever I think about it, when we break up light like that, from a contiguous experience down to a decoherent spray on a backboard, what's the point at which it stops being one stream of light and instead has to call itself... I dunno. But it seems like it must be totally fractured by the experience.”

Her troll girlfriend sits up against the big plush cushion, grouping her own messy hair in her hands. “Hmm, did you really ever think that about them? C'mon, this is a Jade Harley problem. 'Cuz it sounds like you wondered why other versions of _you_ would act so weird, not like you expected, even when they had all the experience of fucked-up timelines and other selves that you did. But I think you can't overempathize with anybody. Not even fragments of yourself, not with the light that breaks apart from stress. Letting their desires trump yours just drives you to inaction, makes you slow.”

“God, that sounds... Callous. Cold.”

“Doesn't matter. You can't function worrying about it like that.”

“See… I just have to wonder. Because she, my other self, back when I was having all those experiences, was changed by them, or her versions of them, right?” Vriska finishes putting her own hair up, and reaches over, fingers rustling through Jade's, who sits forward. Vriska sits behind her, and her hands creep up the back of Jade's head, gathering up a great handful of wild tangles. Digits run through the whole black mass. “We know that trauma kind of… burns you out, torches the part of the brain that feels stress and leaves the throttle open, so you’re constantly in a state of bodily panic for your whole life. Just, all adrenaline, all the time. And sometimes I think, shit, did that affect her? Did it affect me when I took my Sprite self in, and the universe reconfigured my mind down to the medulla to accommodate?”

The woman behind her shifts uncomfortably, but says nothing.

“Because… she wasn’t even embodied, when it happened. She had no brain. I mean--” Jade turns, looking into Vriska's face with an apologetic pursing of her lips. Vriska grimaces.  
“Physically, I mean! What would it even mean for the brain of a ghost to be able to shift like that? Unless.”

“Unless it was your ultimate self. I dunno. First, I don’t know how you can even tell which of the two of you is the ‘self’, anymore. Sounds like your experiences are jumbled up enough to form one continuous memory, even if they're not coherent as a narrative. Second, I don't think you should care about the effect, the way the brain changes, the biology or neurochemistry of it. Can't fix that. The point is that you don’t let it turn you terrified, scared, small.”

Jade's back slumps against the stuffed whale in the corner. Neck relaxing, she lets Vriska gently roll her head from side to side as she plays with her hair.

She's quiet for a while, then, letting Vriska loll and pivot her neck with massaging fingers, and every so often a slight groan emits with a particularly pleasing touch at a tensed muscle or aching spot. But eventually Jade sighs, and leans forward, planting her elbows in the bed between her legs. The long arc of her back flexes for a moment, its bared scars innumerable from a childhood of exploration and excitement, before she reaches forward in a supine stretch. "Yeah. Yeah, I suppose it can't really matter, can it. Better keep moving forward."

"Attagirl." Vriska pivots on her rear, feet planted on the wall now to lay back flat alongside Jade's legs. "Is that what had you up? Just feeling your age?"

"Na'ah." An ear flicks, and Jade closes her eyes, arms still reaching out almost to the length of her toes. "I don't usually have too much trouble sleeping, but tonight I just had to wonder..."

"Wonder about?"

"What happened? How'd you come back? Do you even know, does anybody?"

Vriska shrugs, eyes meeting Jade's. _She has such adorably long eyelashes_ , Vriska thinks. _I wonder why I never noticed that before._

"What happened to Lord English? Did June ever even go back to check on what happened with all that, if we ever really concluded anything?"

Vriska blinks. "Na'ah. I don't think anybody cares, not anymore. I did, up until the moment it became clear that it didn't matter whether or not I got all the glory, because maybe nobody would ever know, or notice."

"...Huh?" Jade draws herself back up, spins around, lays next to Vriska. She plants her feet on the wall as well, grubby toes leaving long dirt-gray streaks across cream-colored paint. "Glory of what?"

A sigh. "When you gave up your First Guardian powers, when they were taken away with the Green Sun fucking off, did you cry?"

"...No. No, I didn't, not even once. I missed them, because they were useful, but the connection was never like that for me. It was something I came to accept and tame and use, not something I cherished or found a way to love. Maybe it'd be different if I felt like I couldn't fix anything I needed to, but I can. I'm still useful, I'm still good."

"Yeah. You're a good dog." Vriska ruffles her hair, eliciting a blink and excited yip. "I would've cried, I think. So much power! Not because you need to help people with it, but just the ability to..." she snaps her fingers, eyes narrowing. "God, so much I could just fuck up with powers like that. I can't imagine being able to give it up, not screaming in rage at the unfairness of it all."

"I've lost too many things." Jade curves her neck over to lay in the crook of Vriska's shoulder. "That was the easiest to accept, honestly-- that and never seeing my grandpa again. Honestly, not having the Green Sun's powers was sort of a relief, because I knew that I'd just get conked out again the moment anything interesting happened."

The two lay silently for a while, then, until the first titters and peeps of birdsong worm their way through the cracks in the skylight. The sky, still dark, glimmers overhead like a blanketfort, a private dome for each to fill with her secrets.

After a time, Jade tips an ear up, listening to one call cutting through all the rest. The song of a meadowlark, sailing and shrill, echoes from some nearby prairie, and Jade rolls to face her girlfriend. She opens her mouth to speak.

Vriska expects something corny, an adequate sendoff to a conversation ladened with sentimentality and mourning for the past. But Jade says perhaps the most touching thing of all, then.

"Wanna have another go before we get breakfast?"

Vriska nods, expression suddenly stoic, businesslike.

They don't make love-- after all, the term is one they find mutually cloying, perhaps even offensive. But there exists, in the spark between their bodies, a history, a language unshared with any others, two survivors at the foot of a long road, hand in hand.

* * *

A week before, Jade had finally tracked a fluffle-family of young brown rabbits back to their warren. The chase had lasted the better part of two hours after she'd seen the mother's ears sticking out of a half-chewed spinach plant. Vriska followed as she scampered, hair and skirt billowing with her gallop, and when Jade finally scooped them all up with her powers the shorter woman had smirked.

"What'cha gonna do with those? Lunch?"

But Jade had smiled, flown far enough afield to rehome them safely while preserving her greens, and brushed the symbolic dirt from her hands. "You said it yourself: sometimes the best way to save the people around you is to pursue your own passions, first." She gazed into the cloudless sky, basking in the warm sunlight.


End file.
